The NYUAD Art Gallery is bringing in a new major exhibition by art collective Slavs and Tatars, titled Mirrors for Princes and on view from February 28 through May 30, 2015.
The show is the collective’s most ambitious one to date, spreading over 650 square meters and three radically diverse environments. The exhibition and the book that accompanies it trace modern obsession with self-help to the medieval genre of political science – “mirrors for princes” like Machiavelli’s The Prince – in Muslim and Christian traditions.
The first of the exhibition’s environments is a five-channel audio installation portraying a series of mirrored speakers enact play excerpts from an 11th-century “mirror for prince” text in five different languages. The next environment is a “psychadelic” gallery featuring glowing, fetishistic sculptures focused around the notion of grooming, and the last is a serene reading room and tea house.
The accompanying book, published by JRP|Ringier and also titled Mirrors for Princes, is comprised of a hybrid of original art and scholarly research with a series of essays specially commissioned for the exhibition.
See the Slavs and Tatars exhibition page for details. **
