Made in Dschermany extends Slavs and Tatars’ artistic practice into German orientalism, philology and the country’s complex relationship with Islam, through the perspective of four letters: DSCH.
“The investigation of Germany’s rapport with Islam extended to the marketing material of exhibition which featured a list of words skewering the phoneme [ʤ] in German. As German lacks such a sound, the attempts to transliterate it reveal a conscious bias, depending on the origin of the word. Western words with [ʤ] are left alone – i.e., gin and tonic, Gentrifizierung (gentrification), Joggingschuhe (sneakers) – while words of Eastern origin are burdened with a clunky [dsch]: see Dschellaba, Dschungelfieber, Dschengis Khan.”
The exhibition was presented at the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
with Slavs and Tatars