Co-founders of art collective Slavs and Tatars, Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi, have filled their classic Gründerzeitwohnung in Berlin with art, craft and folklore to make a profound statement about hospitality.
Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi, co-founders of art collective Slavs and Tatars, in the living room of their Berlin Moabit apartment. They are surrounded by artworks (From Nine to Five by Florian Auer – a biting critique of the world of finance in the shape of a neon hanger and coat – Agnieszka Kurant and Oskar Dawicki. Dawicki’s work, Speech is Silver, is a silver cast of the artist’s gullet, a work inspired by tales of a medieval torture method that involved pouring molten metal down the throat of a perjurer or blasphemer.
Words: Graham Wood
Styling: Sven Alberding
Photography: Greg Cox
The large Berliner Zimmer, the third room where the moulded ceilings were stripped and preserved, is used as a dining room and kitchen. “Often people don’t know what to do with their Berliner Zimmer. It’s known for being a relatively large room with little light due to its location, wrapped around the staircase of a building,” says Payam. “We decided to make ours a dine-in kitchen. A large carpet in a kitchen might strike some as counterintuitive but it really marks the space, giving it a necessary warmth and allowing for a transition to the dining room.”
The dining room chairs are made by woodworkers in Zakopane, a village in the Polish Tatra mountains where artists and intellectuals have gathered since the end of the 19th century. The Zakopane style was instrumental in crafting a modern Polish identity in architecture and interior design in the early 20th century. The dining table is from Manufactum. The melon lights are a sculpture from Slavs and Tatars: The Fragrant Concubine (2012). The dining room includes works by Cyprien Gaillard, Sture Johannsen, an early Swedish pioneer of digital art and legendary counter-culture figure, and Giorgi Xaniashvili, a Georgian artist whose tongue-in-cheek wooden carvings are the flip side of a day-job carving icons for the Orthodox Church. Payam points out that the catholic incense burner hung next to it is a reference not only to its title, Smells like Shit, but also to the origin of the wood – offcuts for icons.
The Moroccan door that leads to the master bedroom was the first piece purchased for the home.
In the study, a coffee-house genre painting of a circumcision comes from a Jewish antique shop in Tehran. Other artworks include a sculpture by Assaf Gruber and photos by Zbigniew Libera. Kasia and Payam picked up the 1930s swivel chair from a flea market in Berlin, and the desk is from Poland. The rugs include a Persian kilim and another lion rug, a thick, hand-woven rug often made by nomads. A series of sliced bowling balls, Getting Even #6 (2014) by Assaf Gruber, are used as door-stops.
On one side of the kitchen area of the Berliner Zimmer is a mid-century Polish unit Kasia inherited from her family. On the other is a kitchen unit with stove and sink for washing up, and surfaces for food preparation. The shelves are laden with various ceramics and glassware, spices, and cooking and serving vessels.
In the bedroom, the aqua blue tiles are untreated cement, a natural porous finish that allows them to breathe and keep the temperature in the bedroom cool without letting in a draft through the window. In contrast to the rest of the house, the walls, ceilings and storage units are minimalist and unadorned in this section of the house. Hanging from the ceiling is a pająk (Polish for ‘spider’). Originally a pagan tradition, the pająk was traditionally hung from the homes of rural Poles to celebrate the harvest and as well as benediction for the upcoming year of crops. Crafted according to local customs, they are often made with found, ephemeral materials.
