Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Radical Reading

Fellows: Leah Feldman, Slavs and Tatars
Course: Radical Reading (2022), Revolutionary Erotics (2025)

Fellowship Description

Drawing on the form of the board book or reading primer, and in particular its avant-garde heritage and pedagogical mission in the former USSR, Gray Center Fellows Leah Feldman (UChicago Department of Comparative Literature) and Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars take up the problem of worldbuilding through language acquisition, albeit a century later: that is, a decidedly decolonial one where Soviet books were imperialist, a queer one where the former were decidedly heteronormative, a heteroglossic one where the Soviets were almost Muslim in their emphasis on unicity. Transliterative Tease thus imagines such queer, multilingual, multiconfessional, internationalist visions of solidarity through the sensuous activity of reading a book, and producing one at a cost that does not reflect a precious, rare art commodity, but rather—like the Soviet reader—can be made widely affordable and available. In a meme and tumblr dominated world, this project aligns with a crisis in bookmaking and seeks to experiment with the boundaries of the form of the book, harnessing the performative and sensuous as modes for upending the standardizing, ordering principles of late-capitalist modernity in our distracted, social mediated present.

Portable Gray interview with Leah Feldman and Slavs and Tatars HERE.

Courses

Revolutionary Erotics
Fall 2025
CMLT 39800

This seminar will explore revolutionary erotics as both a modality and site of revolutionary thought and action. We will engage erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, probing topics such spirituality and erotics, as well as erotics and its publics and politics. We will think about how erotics and desire have been central to revolutionary art and politics from anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and queer worldbuilding, from revolutionary love to terrorist drag, and from the US to Yugoslavia and Iran. The seminar asks, how has the erotic excited revolutionary action– challenging at once the taboo and commodity fetish—and how can erotics can help us reimagine agitation today?

The Berlin-based seminar will include studio visits with renown contemporary artists, a guided visit of the Gropiusbau’s current show: Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Punk, a performance by CHEAP collective, and a series of events and performances surrounding art week. Studio visits will include meetings with Berlin-based artists such as AA Bronson– co-founder of General Idea, Sophie Jung, Piotr Nathan, and Hito Steyerl.

While in Berlin students will also have time to explore their own research-based art project in consultation with the instructors, relevant archives, and museums. They will have an opportunity to present their work during the final class review and critique.

Radical Reading
Spring 2022
CMLT 25130/35130

This experimental course—part seminar and part practicum—brings together Berlin-based artist collective Slavs and Tatars and Prof. Leah Feldman (Comparative Literature). It explores material and conceptual approaches to radical reading. In the practicum students will design a creative project informed by the seminar’s exploration of histories, sites, and genres of radical reading (including revolutionary books and manifestos, children’s primers and comics).

Book

Azbuka Strikes Back is an artist book for children and adults alike by Leah Feldman and Slavs and Tatars which takes the universal idea of an alphabet and unpacks it in fun, incisive and informative ways. This is done to help us better understand where letters come from, why they make certain sounds not to mention their baggage when it comes to gender, race, labor, and empire. Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther and Franz König, Köln Verlag. For more about Azbuka Strikes Back visit  HERE

Fellows

LEAH FELDMAN

Leah Feldman’s research explores the poetics and the politics of global literary and cultural entanglements, focusing critical approaches to translation theory, semiotics, Marxist aesthetics and decolonial theory, which traverse the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her book On the Threshold of Eurasia: Orientalism and Revolutionary Aesthetics in the Caucasus (Cornell 2018) exposes the ways in which the idea of a revolutionary Eurasia informed the interplay between orientalist and anti-imperial discourses in Russian and Azeri poetry and prose. Tracing translations and intertextual engagements across Russia, the Caucasus and western Europe, it offers an alternative vision of empire, modernity and anti-imperialism from the vantage point of cosmopolitan centers in the Russian empire and Soviet Union. She is currently writing on the rise of the New Right in late/post-Soviet Eurasia and a book tentatively titled Feeling Collapse on Soviet film, art and performance from Central Asia and the Caucasus amidst the collapsing sensorium of the Soviet Empire. Her work has appeared in Slavic Review, boundary 2, Ab Imperio, and Global South.

SLAVS AND TATARS

Slavs and Tatars is an internationally-renowned art collective devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle Zurich, Albertinum in Dresden and Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art Warsaw, among others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications and lecture-performances. Imbued with humor and a generosity of spirit, their work commonly blends pop visuals with esoteric traditions, oral rituals with scholarly analysis in a way that opens new paths of contemporary discourse. In addition to their translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (currently in its 2nd edition with I.B Tauris), Slavs and Tatars have published more than ten books to date, most recently Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on the politics of alphabets and transliteration. In 2019, the collective curated the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts and their work was included in the main exhibition, “May You Live in Interesting Times,” of the 58th Venice Biennale. They have participated in the 11th Sharjah, 10th Manifesta, 8th Berlin and 9th Gwangju Biennials as well as group shows at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthaus Graz, and Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The collective launched a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region in 2018 and recently opened Pickle Bar, a new project space-cum-slavic apéritivo bar a few doors down from their studio in Berlin’s Moabit district.