Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Hang Don’t Cut, Slavs and Tatars' second solo exhibition with the gallery and first in Los Angeles. Founded in 2006, Slavs and Tatars mine the complexities and unexpected affinities across cultures through publications, lecture performances, and installations. The collective explores a literary and political geography known as Eurasia, defined by themselves as “east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China”. The artists work across cycles, where extended periods of research give life to an eco- system of installations, sculptures, lectures, and printed matter that question our understanding of language, ritual and identity. Imbued with humor and a generosity of spirit, their work commonly blends pop visuals with esoteric traditions, oral rituals with scholarly analysis in a way that opens new paths of contemporary discourse. Hang Don’t Cut presents a taxonomy of unique glass blown lamps (the Slavic etymology of melon stems from the verb дыть or "to blow”), each a nod to a particular species of melons of Central Asia, in particular in Uzbekistan and Xinjiang. The melons represent repositories of knowledge, as vectors of writing, as well as agencies of resource extraction. Considered a rare delicacy, the winter melon is carefully stored in warehouses (ковунхане) to ripen late, amongst the last fruit to do so as the first frosts arrive. The melon is coveted throughout Eurasia as an exceptional, almost miraculous product of nature: a luscious, sugary yield within an otherwise increasingly barren season and landscape. Mirror works on the surrounding walls feature a ‘captcha' camouflaged within the texture of a melon and in different alphabets (Russian Cyrillic, Kazakh Cyrillic, Latin): a nod to the distinction between human and artificial intelligence while a new range of merch explores the discourse around melons, from cosmology to commerce.