‘First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. AES+F work at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies. They define their practice as a kind of “social psychoanalysis” through which they reveal and explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.
‘AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative, other-worldly Last Riot (2007), the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations of striking originality that have come to define both the AES+F aesthetic and the cutting edge of the medium’s capacities. The second of the series, The Feast of Trimalchio (2009), appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra (2011), debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. United as The Liminal Space Trilogy, this tour-de-force series was premiered in September 2012 at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, and the Moscow Manege, the central exhibition hall of the artists’ home city, and has since been shown on many occasions at various museums and festivals. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.
‘Between 2016 and 2019, AES+F have also worked in set design for theater and opera. The artists created their first video set design for Psychosis, a reinterpretation of Sarah Kane’s famous play, 4:48 Psychosis, directed together with Alexander Zeldovich. Psychosis premiered at Electrotheater Stanislavsky in Moscow in June 2016. In 2019, the group premiered their first opera together with the Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, a reimagined Turandot acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Turandot was created as an international co-production at the initiative of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, together with Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, and Lakhta Center in St. Petersburg.
‘For over two decades, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art around the world, including — in addition to Moscow and Venice — those of Adelaide, Gwangju, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Kochi-Muziris, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Vancouver, and many others. Their work has also been featured in influential events devoted to new media — such as ARS Electronica (Linz), Mediacity Seoul and Video Zone (Tel Aviv) — and photography — such as FotoFest (Houston), Les Rencontres d’Arles and Moscow’s Photo Biennial.’
Further
AES+F Site
AES+F @ Instagram
Book: ‘AES+F’
AES+F: Social Psychoanalysis
AES+F: Surreal Visions
AES+F, Inverso Mundus
Turning the World Upside Down
In the Studio: AES+F
Exhibitions
Выставка AES+F в Манеже (2019)
The Liminal Space Trilogy at Faena Arts Center, Buenos Aires
Eha Komissarov: AES+F. Viimane ülestõus
Interview
NM: In your interviews you comment that contemporaneity and capturing it in digital format is of an enduring interest to you and is important your practice. What are the main characteristics of the contemporaneity in 2022 that you will focus on in the next projects?
AES+F: We are planning a major new project in 2022 that will interpret contemporaneity through the Odyssey, one of the most famous and important literary works of Western civilization. Our main concept was to research a literal coincidence of the basic myth with urgent contemporary issues, such as ecological, social, political, etc. We conceptualized the project before the pandemic, but as it turns out it deals with many themes that define our post-pandemic reality.
NM: As for pioneers in digital art it is probably interesting for you to see the ongoing explosion in this field. How do you feel about it and where do you see it going? Do you feel yourself challenged to reinvent yourself once more?
AES+F: We are of course very interested and follow the developments of the field. You could say we are even a bit neurotic about constantly reinventing ourselves, but it is important to us that technology follows concepts, not vice versa. We feel that the explosion of the digital is not accompanied by an equally explosive reinterpretation of reality at the moment.
NM: Nature of your work and its medium makes your digital artworks global. What role does a local and historical context play for you? Did the fact that you met and started working shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union influence your early works? Do the historical shifts find their ways into your digital pannos through allegories, metaphors, archetypes, or human faces and figures you select?
AES+F: The fact that we started working after the collapse of the Soviet Union is determinant of our worldview. Everything that seems unchangeable in fact changes very quickly, and observing the changes in society and culture produces the main content of our work. In terms of the local and global, Russia doesn’t fall out of the global processes, but is in fact a place where some of the global conflicts and changes are felt much more sharply. In regard to your last question about historical shifts finding their way into our work through allegories and archetypes, the answer is of course they do.
NM: Your works are full of people of idealized proportions with glowing faces, pictures of health and tranquility. In a way these attributes provide the people you portray a connection to XIX century European classicism. Do you specifically choose these types of glamorous, idealized Renaissance-like archetypes? And why?
AES+F: We work with people who exemplify social and cultural archetypes or cliches – a “poor old man,” a “wealthy young woman,” a “corporate board member,” etc. This is the “raw material” of our work. What you describe about people with idealized proportions relates not to the external features of the models, who are very diverse, but to their internal state, their calm expressions and alienation from one another. The feeling of metaphysical isolation from reality is what positions these in relation to classical European painting.
NM: Violence looks monotonous and routine in your works. Is this an ironic way to see how low human beings could stoop? How desensitized we are to the pain of others or there is a more positive message to this?
AES+F: It’s not about how low humanity can stoop, it’s more about reflecting the glamourization of violence in the media, which is also its routinization. We deconstruct the way the media portrays violence in its attempt to make it beautiful and entertaining, although repetitive, and in that sense it is not about human nature but the nature of media. Now, whether the media portrays human nature or not, we couldn’t say.
NM: Finally, I wanted to touch on Witnesses of the Future. Islamic Project from 1996-2003, when you sent out postcards across the world as your way of responding to globalization and illustrating how open borders could create new striking realities. If you were to revisit this project today, in our post-pandemic reality how would you have changed it? Not necessarily in terms of the Islamic imagery, but in terms of your view of the interconnected world and its visual cliches.
AES+F: We would say that Allegoria Sacra, Inverso Mundus, and Turandot 2070 in a lot of ways illustrate the post-pandemic reality, sometimes literally. A great example in Allegoria Sacra (2011) is the setting of the suspended airport where all flights are grounded. Another example is the micro-world made disproportionately large in Inverso Mundus (2015), rendered as giant pulsating microorganisms descending from the sky. In Turandot 2070 (2020) the masses worship Turandot’s virtual avatars, in a surprising way coming ahead of the hysteria over NFTs and the global acceleration of the adoption of virtuality.
Works
The King of the Forest (2001)
‘The King of the Forest consists of large-scale photographic and Betacam video works, seeking to deconstruct the influence of culture and mass media’s exploitation of children as commodities available to a consumerist gaze, using childhood as a medium to examine cross-cultural fallacies. Set in three architecturally notable locations and featuring white-clad children aged 3 to 11, the works in this cycle address the status of childhood within a global, media-saturated environment, typified by the use of nubile, underage youth in fashion campaigns and propaganda. To the same degree that contemporary media find these children captivating, they are also captives of respective forms of power, ideology, or exploitation, and are often victims of an overtly pedophilic visuality. The work borrows its title from the eponymous Michel Tournier novel that reinterprets the Erlkönig myth in terms of a figure who recruits children to Nazism. It is set in the huge ballroom of Catherine’s Palace in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. In a series of 15 photographs and one video, children from the nearby ballet and sports schools are depicted detained within this gilded, mirrored hall, whose structure evokes an overwhelming opulence, order, and grandeur.’
The Last Riot (2005)
‘The Last Riot project began in 2005 as a thematic successor to Action Half-Life, with digital collages depicting a bloodless battle royale among young adults, adolescents, and children set in a hellish virtual landscape spanning from a desert beach to a snow-capped volcano, populated by scattered structures and machinery from disparate time periods. The project first consisted of just two panoramic pigment prints that were shown at Invasion, a special project of the First Moscow Biennale in 2005, and at ARS 06. Sense of the Real at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki in 2006. Then they were completely reworked and became part of a single ultra-wide digital collage consisting of four individual panoramas, exhibited at the 10th Istanbul Biennial in 2007. From 2005 to 2007, a total of 26 prints of different sizes and formats were created under the title Last Riot 2, analogous to the reversed sequential logic of Action Half-Life and George Lucas’s Star Wars, which served as the original inspiration for the former. The prints of Last Riot 2 were followed by a video installation, Last Riot, which premiered at the Russian Pavilion of the 2007 Venice Biennale, completing the first part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, and subsequently appearing in the group’s 2007 retrospective in St. Petersburg and the survey exhibition of the Trilogy at Moscow’s Central Exhibition Hall “Manege” and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 2012.’
Trailer
The Feast of Trimalchio (2009)
‘As the second part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, The Feast of Trimalchio is an ironic allegory of Heaven, taking its title from an eponymous fragment of Gaius Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon. Situated at an impossibly luxurious island resort that miraculously combines a tropical coastline with a ski slope, the work explores geopolitical, cultural, racial, and gender issues, weaving them into a single complex narrative that surveys the contemporary relationships between two key global socioeconomic classes: masters and servants. The masters are represented as the white-clad guests of the resort, their demographics reflecting more or less the distribution of global wealth. The servants are predominantly young and attractive representatives of the global South working in the vast hospitality industry, dressed in traditional uniforms with an ethnic twist. As the leisure time of the masters drags on, strict social roles slowly melt into ambiguity until they are fully reversed in the tradition of the Roman saturnalia. While many cataclysmic events take place in this Paradise, from a tsunami to an invasion by aliens, everything always reverts to an endless ritual of leisure and pleasure, in which the servants and the served alternate in perpetuity.
‘The Feast of Trimalchio was originally composed of a video installation in 9-channel, 3-channel, and single-channel versions, as well as a series of Allegories as large digital collages and 9 Panoramas that fit together into a single ultra-wide digital collage. Later the project also came to include a series of oil paintings, printed stills from the video, and portfolios of photographic source material. Visually referencing Mannerism, ancient Roman frescoes, and tourism advertisements, the video is accompanied by a classical soundtrack featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, with contemporary interludes commissioned from Pavel Karmanov.’
Trailer
Allegoria Sacra (2011)
‘Allegoria Sacra is the third and final part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, taking its inspiration from Giovanni Bellini’s eponymous painting hanging in the Uffizi of Florence, which, according to a nineteenth-century interpretation, depicts Purgatory. Much as in The Feast of Trimalchio, the setting of the archetype is transposed to a contemporary analog, in this case an architecturally futuristic international airport — a nonplace par excellence — populated by diverse passengers awaiting flights to their destinations. The setting evolves from snow dunes to desert and to jungle as it plays temporary host to refugees fleeing ethnic conflict in the Middle East, a group of transit passengers in traditional garb from Darfur or Peshawar, the cannibals of Papua New Guinea, a delegation of Chinese executives, Western same-sex multiracial family units, a missionary priest, and a neo-Nazi, among others. They are joined by those who represent more overt references to mythical personas in Bellini’s painting, such as Job as an elderly man in a high-tech life-support bed, St. Sebastian as a young nomad returning from the exotic South, St. Paul as a member of the tactical police yet brandishing a sword, a centaur, and the stewardesses from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as stand-ins for angels and the Madonna. Threading together complex sociopolitical issues — from identity and Otherness to shifting economic hegemonies and regional conflicts, from transhumanism to climate change—Allegoria Sacra is a meditation on the wholesale transformation of post-colonial civilization instigated by Western globalist fantasies.
‘The entire work is composed of a video installation in 5-channel, 3-channel, and single-channel versions, a series of 14 digital collages as grand tableaux, oil paintings, and series of printed stills from the video, with a number of other components projected yet unrealized. Aesthetically as close to early Renaissance art as to the TV series Lost, the video component of Allegoria Sacra is accompanied by a classical soundtrack composed almost entirely of excerpts from eighteenth-century funeral marches: Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater, Händel’s The Ways of Zion Do Mourn, Chopin’s Marche funèbre: Lento, Schubert’s Der Leiermann as arranged by Liszt, and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, with the only contemporary exception being samples of Ryoji Ikeda’s Opus 1.’
Trailer
Inverso Mundus (2015)
‘Inverso Mundus takes as its initial reference point the sixteenth-century carnivalesque engravings in the genre of “world upside down,” an early form of populist social critique that emerged with the advent of the Gutenberg press. The project’s title intermingles ancient Italian and Latin, based on a century-old layering of meaning, combining inverso, the Italian “reverse” and old Italian “poetry,” with Latin mundus, meaning “world.” Inverso Mundus reinterprets contemporary life through the tradition of engraving, depicting a contemporary world consumed by a tragicomic apocalypse whereby social conventions are inverted to highlight the underlying premises that we always take for granted. Metrosexual garbage collectors douse the streets in sewage and refuse. An international board of directors is usurped by their impoverished doppelgangers. The poor give alms to the rich. Chimeras descend from the sky to be caressed like domestic pets. A pig guts a butcher. Women clad in cocktail dresses sensually torture men in cages and on devices styled after IKEA furniture in an ironic reversal of the Inquisition. Preteens and octogenarians fight a kickboxing match. Riot police embrace protesters in an orgy on a massive luxurious bed. Men and women carry donkeys on their backs, and virus-like Radiolaria from Haeckel’s illustrations loom over and settle on oblivious people occupied with taking selfies.
‘The soundtrack of the video is an amalgamation of Léon Boëllmann’s 1895 Suite Gothique, an original piece by contemporary composer and media-artist Dmitry Morozov (aka VTOL), along with excerpts from Ravel, Liszt, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky, with a particular emphasis on “Casta Diva” from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.’
Trailer
Excerpt
Turandot 2070 (2020)
‘Turandot is an early “globalized” fable, in which, however, ethnicities and nationalities have relatively little bearing on the presentation of a fantastic, abstractly far-away world. Originally depicted as a Slavic princess by twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi in his Haft Peykar (1197), Turandot became Chinese in a later manifestation of the story in 18th Century by the Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi. When in 2019 the Teatro Massimo in Palermo staged a new production of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot*, the libretto for which was closely based on Gozzi’s Orientalist play, they commissioned AES+F to do the art direction for the performance. The result was an opera that kept the Chinese setting but boldly shed its Orientalist past, transporting the viewer into a dystopian high-tech future where Beijing is the capital of a global totalitarian empire ruled by a techno-feminist matriarchy with princess Turandot at the helm. Directed by Fabio Cherstich, Turandot was subsequently performed in Bologna’s Teatro Comunale and at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe. The set design that the artists created then became the basis for Turandot 2070, the video installations and prints that followed, with a contemporary soundtrack composed by Vladimir Rannev which distantly echoes Puccini.
‘The work highlights a myriad of today’s most pressing issues by exploring a possible future dominated by a grotesque totalitarian social system, whose rise is attributed directly to contemporary events, and which in itself constitutes an analysis of Western society’s fear for the rapid advance and expanding influence of China. The final scene in the video, titled “Paradise,” depicts a utopian and equally hyperbolized transformation of this futuristic society where everyone, stripped to nothing but pastel-colored underwear, cannot but engage in acts of tenderness toward one another with no regard for physical differences.’
Trailer
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Thanks for the hook up. Everyone, jay found Unica Zurn’s great novel ‘Dark Spring’ on Internet Archive, so you can read it gratis if you want. Here. ‘Diary of […], aged 12’ doesn’t ring a bell. Unless you mean ‘Taylor Mead on Amphetamine and in Europe: Excerpts from the Anonymous Diary of a New York Youth’, which I doubt you do. I’ll think further though. A practical visit, gotcha. Soviet Tower Blocks, okay. The only place I’ve been where that was the layout was Moscow, and I found it highly interesting but really oppressive. Oh, I don’t know, super musty emo clothes might add value? I spend too much time on perv sites, clearly. Good luck getting everything sorted by tomorrow. See you on that side or on the other side, whichever comes first. ** _Black_Acrylic, I would love to read your Zurn writings, so I hope the YnY site comes back, well, for lots of reasons obviously. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Great, yeah, she’s amazing. The big festival said we’d be informed after 5:30 pm today, but, if they don’t, we’ll just say yes to the German festival, which would be nothing but a relief at this point. News tomorrow. Our French distributors want to push our film as a weird comedy, which it is in many respects, but a ‘Beetlejuice’-like poster is going way, way too far in theory. We’ll see. No, I ate a too hard caramel chip cookie from the mini-mart near me, but I suppose it warded off love’s cravings for a short time at least. German seems like it must be so hard. Which seems strange because Dutch, which is somewhat close to it relatively speaking, is fairly easy. Love telling the first mouse to have appeared in his apartment in well over a year to kindly set down stakes elsewhere ASAP for its own sake, G. ** Tyler Ookami, Oh, wow, you know that ‘Lonesome Cowboys’ locale. Now I really want to go. Spahn Ranch, where the Manson crew famously squatted, was kind of the same re: LA when I was a kid. I think it finally burned down. Anyway that’s so cool about the ‘LC’ site. I feel a bit starstruck. Yes, very much what you said about 60s/early 70s experimental film. Apart from remote experimental film venues in a handful of big cities, that work is now pretty much relegated to galleries and museums. But the problem, and it’s kind of a big problem, is that galleries and museums are geared towards people on the move, to quickly absorbing a work of art and moving on, so experimental films are generally just briefly noted in those contexts as opposed to taking the time and concentration they ask for, which theaters provide(d). It’s a conundrum. ** Carsten, Hey. I sort of like when low budget art films employ CGI as best they can, but I’m very fond of failed, bridge-too-far ambitions in work, as you probably know. The Denis film will probably get around and get shown, given her currently good rep, luckily for presumably us. ** Dev, Her work is really special. That tea garden sounds really lovely indeed, wow. I didn’t know such places existed. Tea isn’t a huge thing here in France, so I’m probably out of luck. ** Bill, Cool. Yeah, she’s incredible, right? And her writing is equally fantastic, especially ‘Dark Spring’. I don’t remember the music in ‘The Roe’s Room’, which I guess says something. Interesting film in and of itself, though. ** Mari, Hello to you! Are the classes starting well? Seems so? Actual dolls. Her bf of the time, the artist Hans Bellmer, is best known for the very strange dolls he made, If you search his name, you’ll see. When you interview someone at, say, a restaurant or bar or cafe, the magazine or whoever commissioned the interview foots the bill, yes. Yes, in almost all cases you finish the interview, say goodbye, and that’s it. It’s very rare for anything to come of it. You mention Christian Bale: that’s a rare case where he and I subsequently became friends. There were two interviewers for him because the other interviewer, a friend, knew CB’s work better than I did at that point, so that helped. Thank you so kindly. Hopefully I’ll write another book one of these days. Gosh, I wouldn’t know what to suggest as per starting to read my work. Maybe the GM Cycle. Not ‘The Sluts’, although that seems to be what 90% of people read first. Two hour round trip is a lot. Do you drive or use public transport? Yes, it’s raining here and even kind of chilly. It feels sort of almost like god outside. I hope you got some sleep. ** HaRpEr //, Hey, hey. Exciting: your novel thoughts. As much as I hate having to describe something I’m writing, it can weirdly help a lot when you have to reduce something complex into a palatable sentence or four. Strange. ‘Dark Spring’ is great. It’s on Internet Archive, as jay pointed out, but that’s the opposite of physical. ‘Progress of Stories’ is very worth reading, of course. I don’t know about that ‘Didion/Babitz’ book. How very curious. I’ll look into it. ** Nicholas., I can imagine you getting tired once in a while. Gosh, thank you. Oh, uh, the spark just stayed alive, I don’t know why. Why wouldn’t it, I guess? I’m fundamentally no different now than when I was young and wanted to know everything and knew very little. If I come across any happy gay books, I’ll pass them on. Kind of a tall order though, haha. Wait, I just recommended ‘I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear’ to someone here the other day. It’s happy and very pleasurable. Dinner tonight? Not sure yet. I’d like to eat out in a restaurant because I rarely do, so maybe I’ll do that, and maybe it’ll be Ethiopian. You? ** Corey, I remember liking that John Huston film too. It’s been ages. Festivals sure should, but they sure almost never do. ** Okay. I’m not even sure what I think about the work of the oddball Russian artist collective AES+F, but I decided to give them a show in my galerie and see what happened. See you tomorrow.
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