AES+F

Born 1955 (Tatiana Arzamasova), 1958 (Lev Evzovich), 1957 (Evgeny Svyatsky) and 1956 (Vladimir Fridkes). Lives and works in Moscow, Russia.

AES+F: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes, The Feast of Trimalchio, 2009 (video still), nine-channel video installation, 19 mins. Courtesy the artists; Triumph Gallery, Moscow; and Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. The presentation of this project was made possible through the generous support of the Andrew Cameron Family.

AES+F are a Russian collective who produce large-scale digital video installations as well as photographic and sculptural works. Since the group began in 1987, AES+F have interwoven imagery relating to modern technology, Hollywood cinema, fashion photography, advertising, religious fundamentalism, the British Royal Family, mass media, popular culture and youth obsession throughout their work.They create hybrid worlds populated by strange mythic creatures that, from seemingly Olympian heights, touch on such worldly issues as consumerism, terrorism, and the gap between rich and poor. Their digital collages bring together photographic sources with animated landscape and objects in order to subvert orders of reality, fantasy, history and time. AES+F produce futuristic yet mythological images of a Super Race of Heroes that trades off the seductive glamour of advertising and fashion in the post-Photoshop era. This consumerist aesthetic is mixed with elements obviously referring to the high culture of Old Master paintings to create a world that is simultaneously familiar and alienating.

Previous AES+F works have presented light boxes showing a fashion runway parade using unidentified corpses from the public morgue as models; an animated film of thousands of photographs; teenagers recruited from model agencies playing perfect warriors and fighting it out with swords and other weapons in a virtual desert landscape; and a series of posters and photo-panels that publicised a travel agency for the future in which the Taliban had taken over well-known western monuments, such as St Peter’s in Rome or the Berlin Reichstag, and turned them into mosques. These satirical, dystopian, virtual views of globalised culture identities are fused and homogenised with archetypes: the rebel, the angel, the servant, the victim, the aggressor, and high-end technology is used to imagine and celebrate the end of ideology, history and ethics. The Feast of Trimalchio is a nine-channel animation of over 75,000 photographs. With panoramic, immersive, sumptuous colour and a loud symphonic soundtrack, it depicts a contemporary version of a famous scene from Petronius’s Satyricon. Petronius was a Roman writer, satirist and lyric poet during the time of Nero (AD 37–68). In the text, Trimalchio, a freed slave who has grown wealthy, hosts a lavish banquet attended by the main protagonists.

The extravagant feast is described in extensive, comic detail and ends with a simulation of Trimalchio’s own funeral, at his behest. His name, therefore, has become synonymous with vulgar excess, wealth, luxury, unbridled pleasure and hubris. For AES+F, Trimalchio, a former slave and the nouveau riche host, appeared not so much as an individual but as an embodiment of luxury, a temporary paradise that one has to pay to enter. In this neo-Brechtian twenty-first-century version of the tale, which reflects on the contemporary state of Russia as well as on the behaviour of the wealthy across the globe, the hotel guests are the ‘masters’ of the land of the Golden Billion who spend their time at the ‘Trimalchio’, an excessively artificial and obscenely luxurious hotel. The whiteclad hotel guests move like ghosts around the hotel grounds – which combine arctic wastes with ski slopes and a tropical coastline – and in the attentive staff all types and races of humanity are represented. As the two interact, the one ‘servicing’ the other, hierarchies are subverted in a celebration of excess underlaid by a dystopian foreboding of disaster.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2009 ‘Angels–Demons. Parade’, Lille, France
2008 ‘AES+F’, Arario-Beijing Gallery, Beijing, China
2008 ‘AES+F. Il Paradiso Verde …’, MACRO Future, Rome, Italy
2007 ‘AES+F’, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, USA
2007 ‘AES. AES+F’, State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, Russia

Selected Group Exhibitions
2009 ‘Unconditional Love’, 53rd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
2009 ‘Against Exclusion’, 3rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia
2008 ‘Russian Dreams …’, Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, USA
2008 ‘Depletion’, Doron Sebbag Art Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel
2007 ‘Click, I Hope’, Russian Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy

Selected Bibliography
Lia Adashevskaya, ‘AES. AES +F. Confronting Phantoms’, DI (Dialog Iskusstv), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2008, pp. 50–56
Philippe Daverio, ‘La Guerra tiepida, vinta dai Russi’, Art e Dossier, 2009, pp.12–13
Javier Panera, ‘AES+F’, Flash Art International, vol. XLII, no. 268, 2009, p. 87
Olga Sviblova, ‘The Green Paradise …’, aes+f , Passage De Retz, Paris; MAC RO Future, Rome; Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, Moscow, 2008
Alexander Zeldovich, ‘Half Dead, Half Life’, Action Half Life: aes+f, Nazraeli Press, Portland, 2007