Love Letters No. 2,

2013

The artist collective Slavs and Tatars mines history for exemplars of cultural discourse that bridge linguistic, religious, and political thought in Eurasia. Love Letters No. 2 is one of a series of large carpets that recreate illustrations by the Soviet poet, artist, and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky. Slavs and Tatars expands Mayakovsky’s original satirical critique of cultural censorship following the Russian Revolution. Here, his political cartoon has been translated into a hand-knotted wool carpet, an artform associated with the Caucasus, a frequently contested region of extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity at the crossroads of the Russian, Ottoman, and Persian empires. The human body is represented as a tongue behind bars, an image that evokes the power, politics, and threat of language and the attempts to control it during moments of revolution, regime change, or imperial expansion.