The title contains three scripts: Chinese, Arabic, English. 胡(هو / who) are you? It reads like a translingual pun that collapses into a question about identity — the Chinese character 胡 historically denoting foreignness, the barbarian, the other; the Arabic هو meaning "he" or "him"; and the English "who" sitting between them as both homophone and genuine interrogative. This trilingual wordplay follows a pattern consistent with Slavs and Tatars' long-standing engagement with what they call "transliteration as politics". It is a title that asks you to read it aloud, to hear how different writing systems arrive at the same sound, and to wonder what gets lost — or found — in that convergence.

Slavs and Tatars, the collective behind this exhibition opening at Rossi & Rossi in Berlin on 21 March 2026, have spent nearly two decades in precisely this territory: the slippage between languages, the politics buried inside alphabets, the identities that emerge from the cracks between empires. Founded in 2006 as a reading group — not a studio, but people sitting together with books — they staked out a geographic focus that remains singular in contemporary art: the space between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iran, the Turkic and Slavic peripheries. A vast post-Soviet, post-Ottoman, post-imperial swathe that Western art institutions rarely know how to frame, which is why Slavs and Tatars have proved so useful to those institutions, and why the collective's best work exceeds the frame entirely. They publish books — serious, designed, essayistic objects that function as artworks. They give lecture-performances that combine academic rigour with absurdist humour, owing something to both Central European cabaret and the Islamic rhetorical form of the maqama. Their installations make language physical: neon signs in multiple scripts, inflatable sculptures that literalise linguistic metaphors, carpets woven with slogans. The engine driving all of it is a conviction that the choice of script — Cyrillic versus Latin versus Arabic — carries the weight of colonial and anti-colonial projects, of forced modernisation, of belonging and exclusion.

The 胡 character is where this exhibition's real argument lives, and it is worth dwelling on. In classical Chinese, 胡 designated the nomadic peoples to the north and west — a catch-all for the non-Chinese, the foreign, the uncivilised. It appears in words for pepper (胡椒, literally "barbarian spice"), for the fiddle (胡琴, "barbarian stringed instrument"), for nonsense (胡说, "barbarian talk"). A single character containing centuries of othering. And yet it has also been absorbed into everyday vocabulary to the point where its original derogatory force has faded into etymology. The pepper is just pepper. The fiddle is just a fiddle. The violence of the designation wore smooth through use, which is its own kind of politics — not erasure exactly, but a slow metabolising of contempt into habit.

To place this character next to its Arabic near-homophone and its English echo is to perform, in miniature, exactly the operation Slavs and Tatars have always pursued: showing how a sound travels across civilisations, picking up and shedding meaning as it goes. But the title does something more specific than their usual translingual games. It yokes together three distinct histories of othering and self-definition. The Chinese 胡 marks the outsider. The Arabic هو marks the third person — the one spoken about, not to. The English "who" refuses to settle the question at all. Stacked together, they suggest that identity is not just contested but structurally unstable, shifting depending on which phonetic system is doing the parsing. The etymological analysis of 胡 draws on standard classical Chinese lexicography; the trilingual reading is the essay's own interpretive framework.

Berlin, where the collective is based, provides a charged backdrop. Not because the Wall was a linguistic border — East and West Germans spoke the same language — but because contemporary Berlin, with its large Turkish, Arabic-speaking, and post-Soviet populations, is a city where scripts and tongues jostle daily on shopfronts, on bureaucratic forms, in the code-switching of ordinary conversation. It is a place where the question of which alphabet you use is not abstract.

Rossi & Rossi, the gallery hosting the exhibition, has a track record in Asian art practices. Specific details about the gallery's history and Berlin programming are not well documented in available sources. The pairing with Slavs and Tatars makes intuitive sense: a gallery whose expertise lies in Asia's interiors meeting a collective whose project is about those interiors' entanglement with the West.

Over the past several years, Slavs and Tatars have deepened their engagement with what they term "affective politics" — the way bodily practices like prayer, laughter, and speech physically enact ideological positions. Recent cycles of work drew heavily on the politics of the mouth: language as something produced by the body, involving tongue, teeth, breath. Given the title's explicit play on phonetic resemblance across scripts, this exhibition likely continues that somatic thread — the sound "hu" as a point where three civilisational histories converge in a single exhalation. This projection is pattern-based, drawn from programming notes and reviews of recent institutional shows.

There is a risk, of course, that this kind of work becomes a comfortable niche — the clever multilingual collective that institutions programme when they want to signal geopolitical literacy. Slavs and Tatars know this; their self-awareness about it has itself become a kind of armour. The real test of any new exhibition is whether the linguistic play opens onto something genuinely unsettling rather than merely ingenious. Their best work does this: it leaves you uncertain about your own alphabet, the sounds you take for granted as natural rather than political.

胡(هو / who) are you? arrives at a moment when questions of identity feel simultaneously urgent and exhausted. We have had a decade of identity discourse. We have had the backlash to the discourse. What Slavs and Tatars offer is something that predates both: the material, phonetic, scriptural reality that identity has always been a matter of which alphabet you write your name in, which direction your letters travel across the page, and which empire decided your language needed reforming. That is not a metaphor. It is the history of Central Asia, of the Caucasus, of every Turkic language that has been rewritten in three different scripts within a single century. The question in the title is not rhetorical. It is genuinely asking. And the answer, as the three scripts suggest, depends entirely on who is listening — and in which writing system they expect the reply.