Payam Sharifi is a member of Slavs and Tatars, an internationally renowned art collective devoted to an area East of the former Berlin Wall and West of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. Since its inception in 2006, the collective has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via an idiosyncratic form of knowledge production imbued with humor and a generosity of spirit: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Salt, Istanbul; Vienna Secession, Kunsthalle Zurich and Albertinum, Dresden, among others. Slavs and Tatars has published more than ten books, including Wripped Scripped (Hatje Cantz, 2018) on language politics; as well as a translation of the legendary Azerbaijani satirical periodical Molla Nasreddin (IB Tauris, 2017). The artists work across cycles, where extended periods of research give life to an ecosystem of installations, sculptures, lectures, and printed matter that question our understanding of language, ritual and identity. In addition to launching a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from their region, Slavs and Tatars recently opened Pickle Bar, a Slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in Moabit.