Slavs and Tatars, The Alphabet, 2016, vacuum-formed plastic, 25 ¼ x 35 ¾ in. Schwartz Art Collection, Harvard Business School, 2016.13. © Slavs and Tatars.

The vacuum-formed plastic reliefs in this series by the artist collective Slavs and Tatars (founded 2005) reanimate the Poêmes industriels by Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers, alluding to their manufacture as well as their play with language. These dynamic compositions illustrate overlaps in fields such as language, history, and media from origins commonly considered unrelated. In The Alphabet, the Latin alphabet is replaced with an Arabic one. The original exclamation of “OK!” survives unscathed, despite the transmogrification from the secularized world of Latin to the sacred script of Arabic.