Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars is an art collective whose practice is based at the intersection of culture, language, politics and identity, particularly within the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China. Often presented as exhibitions, books or lecture-performances, their work blends humour with scholarly research. Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (2011) was produced for Sharjah Biennial 10. This mixed media installation draws from the art collective’s 79.89.09 project (referencing the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the fall of communism in 1989), marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009. The installation, including banners made by Polish seamstresses or Iranian tailors, spotlights the unexpected commonalities between the Iranian Revolution and Poland’s trade union movement Solidarność of the 1980s. Slavs and Tatars view these two events as bookends to two major geopolitical narratives of the recent past: communism and political Islam. Friendship of Nations explores the connections between the struggle for self-determination in both Poland and Iran, focusing on seventeenth-century Sarmatism  (an ethno-cultural identity within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth)[ , the exodus of Polish refugees to Iran during World War II and the blending of faith with citizen diplomacy.