AES+F
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AES+F
Last Riot / Video Installation /
AES, the group of Moscow artists comprising Tatiana Arzamasova (b.1955), Lev Evzovich (b.1958), and Evgeny Svyatsky (b.1957), brings together two award-winning conceptual architects and a graphic designer. To this collection you need add only fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes (b.1956), and you have what the world now knows as AES+F.
AES+F have exhibited all over the world, drawing the media spotlight by engaging the most heated taboos, ranging from Princess Diana’s death to provocative figurative representations of worldwide media-paranoia about Islamic fundamentalism. Their work features in the collections of numerous leading modern art galleries across the world, including among many others the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. They have exhibited works in video, photography and sculpture all over the world, including in Australia and Singapore. They have also lectured at several leading institutions in France, Germany and the States.
One of the works now on show at London’s RS&A Ltd gallery is ‘Last Riot’, the video installation piece with which they drew the world’s attention at the Venice Biennale in 2007. It is a hybrid dance-battle scene, played out by sword and bazooka-wielding young paid models, plucked from Moscow’s fashionable social scene and chosen for being ‘Caravaggio transgendered types’ – boyish girls and effeminate boys – on a landscape reminiscent of a computer game. And to the accompaniment of Wagner. Their aim in this, they explain, is to take today’s media, video game, Hollywood and fashion-addicted society to ‘a new grotesque, hallucinatory level’.
The London exhibition of their work will also include a new project, ‘Europe-Europe’, a series of porcelain models provocatively depicting modern European social conflicts, and examining the feasibility of today’s European multiculturalism. Suffice it to say that this series includes a rather tender statuette entitled, ‘Turkish Girl and Neo-Nazi Boy’.
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