For the past two decades, the internationally renowned art collective Slavs and Tatars have devoted themselves to a specific regional remit – which they define as ‘east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China’ – comprising nearly a fifth of the Earth’s landmass. This expansive geography, like the collective’s name itself, serves as a rebuff (if not resistance) to reductive questions of identity plaguing the right and the left across the globe today. Their sculptures, books, installations and lecture performances celebrate a multilingualism and multiconfessionalism that make the otherwise daunting metaphysical inquiry – Who are you? – more joyful, irreverent and, alas, fluid.

For their first solo exhibition in Hong Kong – titled 胡 (هو / who) are you? – Slavs and Tatars bring together works across different media that dance merrily around the idea of being and belonging. The presentation includes newly commissioned works from their Love Me Love Me Not series (2014), which features four cities whose names (and their respective alphabets) have fluctuated according to which empire, nation or ruler they belonged. Concrete sculptures resembling road signs – Not Berlin Not Bukhara and Not Bahamas Not Baghdad – refuse to commit to a given destination. Each work highlights a choice between the spiritual/sacred (Bukhara is known as the fourth-holiest city in Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem) and the secular (Berlin’s Berghain or the Bahama’s beaches, to start); but the artists choose not to choose.

Gallery address: 11/F, M Place, 54 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Wong Chuk Hang