The Chinese character 胡 carries a weight that most Western audiences will never fully register. Historically, it denoted foreignness — the barbarian, the outsider, a catch-all for peoples beyond China's northern and western frontiers. In Arabic, هو means "he" or, in Sufi tradition, a divine pronoun referring to God. And in English, "who" is simply the question we ask when we do not yet know someone. Stack these three scripts on top of each other and you get something less a title than a trapdoor: a single syllable that falls through layers of meaning depending on which alphabet you happen to think in.

This is the entry point for 胡(هو / who) are you?, the new exhibition by Slavs and Tatars opening 21 March 2026 in Berlin. The event listing I have access to confirms Berlin as the city but does not specify a venue; details about the exhibition's precise content remain sparse. The show is unmistakably the product of a collective that has spent nearly two decades turning the vast, contested space between the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China into a subject that is simultaneously scholarly, absurd, and genuinely moving.

Slavs and Tatars emerged in 2006 as a reading group. The collective's founding members have been variably identified in press coverage, though the group has historically foregrounded its collective identity over individual attribution. They passed around out-of-print anthropological texts, rare linguistic treatises, the kind of publications that gather dust in university basement stacks. The evolution from book club to internationally exhibited art collective was, by their own account, gradual: the reading became collective annotation, the annotation became visual production, and the visual production retained the texture of reading. Nicholas Cullinan once described them as "the most cosmopolitan of collectives, where a geopolitics of globe-trotting allows their shape-shifting projects and concerns to continuously cross-pollinate divergent, and sometimes diametrically opposed, cultural specificities." That assessment has become something of a boilerplate citation — it appears in a striking number of institutional press releases, which says less about its accuracy than about a critical vocabulary around the collective that hasn't kept pace with the work.

And the work has kept moving. Slavs and Tatars organise their practice into research cycles, each one a sustained investigation that generates exhibitions, books, and their distinctive lecture-performances. Language Arts examined alphabet politics — the power dynamics encoded in whether a people writes in Latin, Cyrillic, or Arabic script. Mirrors for Princes dug into medieval advice literature. Not Moscow Not Mecca explored syncretism, the spaces where belief systems bleed into one another. MERCZbau, shown at the University of Chicago's Neubauer Collegium, imagined a merchandise line for the defunct Department of Oriental Studies at the former Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów — as if the forced westward migration of Poland's population after World War II had never severed those traditions of Eastern scholarship. The title nods to Kurt Schwitters' room-sized Merzbau, destroyed in the same war. The collective designed the whole thing as a boutique-cum-college-bookstore, complete with doorways modelled on traditional carpet-weave patterns and swag that split the difference between luxury fashion house and university gift shop.

There is a consistent method here: take a historical rupture — a border redrawn, a language suppressed, a population displaced — and then speculate forward from the break. What if that department had survived? What if that script had not been replaced? What if that word still meant what it used to mean? The speculation is never utopian. It is forensic and often funny. In The Contest of the Fruits, the collective animated a Uyghur munāzara — a poetic debate between rival fruits — as a Turkic rap battle, each fruit personified with hip-hop swagger and accessorised accordingly, though specific costuming details vary across documentation of the work. The satire cuts in multiple directions at once, honouring a literary tradition while sending up both its earnestness and the Western audience's likely unfamiliarity with it.

胡(هو / who) are you? extends this trajectory into the question of identity itself — the most exhausted subject in contemporary art, and one the collective approaches with characteristic obliqueness. The exhibition's trilingual title performs the problem rather than describing it. Identity, in the Slavs and Tatars universe, is not something you declare; it is something that shifts depending on the script you read it in, the empire that drew your borders, the preposition that connects you to your place of origin. Their own writing identifies "from" as the preposition most central to their cosmology — facing the past but moving forward, like Molla Nasreddin, the Sufi wise-man-cum-fool traditionally depicted riding his donkey backwards.

The sculptures, installations, and printed matter in the show are likely to continue the collective's practice of embedding dense scholarly content in objects that are immediately, almost aggressively, accessible. Their rahlé — stands modelled on traditional holders for holy books, recurring across multiple exhibitions — operate as hinge objects between oral and print cultures, between reverence and irreverence. Specific works for this exhibition have not been detailed in any materials I can access; I'm drawing on the collective's established formal vocabulary and the show's thematic framing. The gap between what you expect from an object shaped like a lectern and what Slavs and Tatars actually put on it — a protruding tongue, a transliterated pun, a Sufi breath exercise — is where their best work operates.

What keeps Slavs and Tatars from collapsing into the kind of identity-art discourse that generates more wall text than insight is their refusal to simplify. The region they claim as their subject encompasses nearly a fifth of the Earth's landmass. It contains more linguistic, religious, and political complexity than most single-topic exhibitions can hope to address. The collective's response is not to flatten that complexity into digestible themes but to inhabit it, to produce work that requires you to hold multiple frames of reference simultaneously. You need to know, or be willing to learn, that 胡 carries the ghost of Chinese imperial taxonomy. You need to register the Sufi resonance of هو. You need to hear the plainness of "who." The work does not explain itself into submission. It trusts that the gaps between these scripts are where the meaning lives.

The question in their title has no question mark. It is less an interrogation than a condition: the permanent, unsettled state of being asked who you are by systems that have already decided the answer, in a language you may not speak, using a script you may not read.