The Level 2 Gallery of London’s Tate Modern is currently hosting an exhibition entitled I Decided Not to Save the World, in collaboration with Istanbul’s SALT Gallery. The exhibition – which will run until January 8th at the Tate and will be at SALT Beyoğlu between the 20th of March and the 20th of May – consists of work by the artists Mircea Cantor, Yto Barrada, and Mounira Al Solh, as well as by the collective known as Slavs and Tatars.

Cantor, a Romanian artist who divides his time between his native Romania and France, is the recipient of numerous awards including this year’s Marcel Duchamp Prize. Known for his ironic, symbolic commentaries on contemporary society and everyday life (in a variety of different artistic media), Cantor is the creator of the video from which this exhibition takes its name.

The Paris-born artist Yto Barrada lives in Tangier, Morocco, where she is the artistic director and co-founder of the Cinémathèque de Tanger. Barrada’s photos and videos, often depicting Moroccan landscapes, people, and everyday objects, have been exhibited at (among others) MoMA, SFMOMA, and the 2007 Venice Biennial.

Mounira Al Solh comes from Beirut, Lebanon. Among her many works addressing the religious and political conflicts of her home country is the 2006 video Rawane’s Song (part of the present exhibition) which won the 2007 VideoBrasil Jury Prize. Al Solh has exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennial, and is the Editor in Chief of the periodical NOA (Not Only Arabic.) 

The witty, often tongue-in-cheek projects of the artistic collective Slavs and Tatars focus on questions of “Eurasian” cultural identity and cross-cultural interaction in a vast region “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China.” The group is the two-time winner of the Fernand Baudin Prize (in 2009 and 2010) and has exhibited at many venues including the Sharjah and Thessaloniki Biennials. Among its other projects, the group has taken an interest in republishing the early 20th-century Azeri humor magazine Molla Nasreddin.