Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » 2008 » Last Riot: AES+F
Last Riot: AES+F
23 February - 15 June 2008 in the Entire Gallery
AES+F’s Last Riot (2007) will light the City Gallery eerily with its presence. The show, whose only New Zealand venue is the City Gallery, is a provocative component of the International Festival of the Arts programme. Last Riot is a three-channel video work, where the virtual world is envisaged as a vast self-propagating and mutating organism which is growing exponentially. The aesthetic is that of the highly stylised computer game, where real and virtual are subsumed in one terrifyingly seamless digital landscape. A new epoch is created, where time collapses in on itself and the dehumanised inhabitants are genderless, ageless and sadistic. In this apocalyptic vision, heroism is survival, difference a fatal vulnerability and hyper-eroticism naturalised. The ‘last riot’ is merely the latest outbreak of violence and aggression: history, ideology and ethics are dead. Last Riot was featured in ‘Click I Hope’, the group exhibition in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale.
AES+F are a highly acclaimed Russian contemporary artist collective whose challenging work garners massive critical attention. The group—originally called AES—formed in 1987, and comprised three Moscow born artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich and Evgeny Svyatsky. With the subsequent addition of fashion photographer Vladimir Fridkes in 1995 the name changed to AES+F. AES+F work across many mediums including photography, computer-based still and moving image work, as well as drawing and sculpture. The ethos of the group stipulates that only Fridkes has a publicly defined role; the others work strictly collaboratively. Following their first international exhibition in 1989 at Howard Yezersky Gallery in Boston, USA, AES/AES+F has been displayed in museums and galleries in Russia and across Europe. The group’s work has featured in numerous biennials (Venice, Lyon, Sydney, Gwangju, Tirana, Istanbul etc) and in a large number of important group and solo shows worldwide. AES+F’s works are held in major Russian and European institutions such as the Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), Multimedia Art Center (Moscow), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), and Center Pompidou (Paris).
Significant past work includes the notoriously controversial Islamic project, which began in 1996 as an installation and performance piece with the establishment of the fictitious ‘AES Travel Agency to the Future’. The group generated promotional material—posters, postcards, mugs, carpets, T-shirts—depicting hybrid reconstructions of iconic images such as the Statue of Liberty wearing a burka, or the Sydney Opera House reconfigured with turrets. The public was involved in filling out questionnaires about their visions of, and fears for the future. The second part of the project, Oasis, which marked the project’s ten year anniversary, re-presented the images as silk screen prints, displayed as the walls of a Bedouin tent. The environment was completed with hookah and Arabic music. This strangely unconvincing and tongue in cheek simulacrum is a good example of AES+F’s provocative experiential practice. Islamic project was conceived by the group as a sort of ‘social psychoanalysis’, and registers the development of phobias and tensions surrounding the East/West oppositional paradigm and the construction of an Islamic ‘other’.
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