Curator: Tami Katz-Freiman
AES+F is considered to be one of Russia's most prominent contemporary art groups. Their video works, sculptures, paintings, photographs and multimedia installations are characterized by breathtaking beauty, accessible and communicative imagery and provocative, ceremonial scenes imbued with a glamorous, sensuous Baroque quality. During the 1990s, the group members forged their own unique language and identity, while touching upon painful and problematic aspects of international politics and world events. Their Islamic Project (1996-2003), for instance, examined the West's phobia concerning Islam, while Suspects (1997) was concerned with youth violence. Like a cinematic production, the works' production process involves choosing sites, role casting models, designing costumes, managing extras and creating complex photographs. The studio work involves digitally manipulating single images and combining them into a kind of multilayered collage, which the group members describe as "digital painting." In the course of this process, which is constructed as a panoramic animation work, the individually photographed figures are fused against a virtual background. The high-resolution photographs create a sterile, imaginary hyperreality. The narrative, cinematic format and the monumental compositions call to mind Renaissance and Baroque battle scenes featuring epic events.
The video work Last Riot came to be seen as one of the group's iconic achievements after being exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and receiving much international attention. It has been termed a "requiem for the modern world," since it presents an apocalyptic vision that reflects the spirit of the time and raises questions concerning the values of Western culture. Set against the backdrop of a synthetic, a-historical landscape is a cluster of androgynous-looking boys and girls who seem to have emerged from a futuristic version of a Benetton ad. These young rebels or contemporary gods - members of different races with a self-estranged, post-human appearance - battle each other in what appears to be a fateful and decisive struggle, in which it is impossible to distinguish between victims and aggressors. Their actions are mechanical and monotonous, and have no apparent reason or goal. They brandish swords and clubs, yet the blades rubbing against bare necks do not really cut into the flesh, and the clubs do not really hit against the body. The range of violent bodily gestures is performed in slow motion and is devoid of fear or pain, as if partaking of a symbolic performance or ritual. This is a simulacrum of sterilized violence that has been stripped of a motive, of emotions and of any vestiges of material existence in favor of a perfect composition produced by 3D technology. It seems that in this work, the AES+F members have distilled their "aesthetics of violence" to its most powerful essence, processing it into a climactic futuristic display suffused with pathos and eroticism.
The compositions and poses of the figures featured in this fantasy are based on a synthesis between classical art and popular art. They include references to Christian iconography in the style of Verrocchio or Bernini, pastoral Baroque scenes in the style of Poussin and Claude Lorrain and social realism inspired by Soviet propaganda paintings - as well as advertisements, fashion layouts, comics, computer games and Hollywood films like "The War of the Worlds." The use of advertising imagery, sensationalism and politics; the glorification of youth; and the preoccupation with globalization and cultural differences produce an allegory for a pathology of violence we have already become indifferent to - an allegory that amplifies, as if under a magnifying lens, the neuroses and fantasies of our world.