On February 5, 2020, Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, Twelve Gates Arts, and CAIR-Philadelphia presented an evening program with Slavs and Tatars.
Slavs and Tatars presented their lecture-performance, Al-Isnad or Chains We Can Believe In as a way to introduce themselves and their new Philadelphia-based residency, The Contest of the Fruits.
Al-Isnad or Chains We Can Believe In tells a story of mysticism within modernity, namely through the unlikely perspective of a Dan Flavin commission for a Sufi mosque in downtown New York in the early 1980s, via the Dia Art Foundation. From Khlebnikov and the Russian Futurists to Charles de Foucauld and le renouveau catholique, the lecture attempts a definition of criticality through hospitality and the sacred, linguistic and syncretic, respectively.
