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Venue Museum of Contemporary Art
AES + F
(Formed AES, 1987 and F with Valdimir Fridkes from 1995)
Tatyana Avzamasova (Born 1955, Moscow)
Lev Evzovitch (Born 1958, Moscow)
Evgeny Svyatsky (Born 1957, Moscow)
Vladimir Fridkes (Born 1956, Moscow)
All live and work in Moscow For ten years the collaborative group AES+F has made art that examines the effects of globalism.
Action Half Life (2003) are a series of large photomontages that depict mock heroic groupings of fresh, young models, picked from a casting process of more than 500 applicants. The landscape backgrounds for the works have been shot in the Sinai Desert, not far from the areas where George Lucas's Star Wars series were made.
AES+F have said about this work - Our heroes are teenagers, emerging from the most "heroic" of life's phases. The teenage moment is the moment when a young shepherd can take heart and gain victory over a hulking giant and when an abandoned child can find the inner unction to extract the magic sword out of a rock to become king, vanquishing all enemies. All of our young heroes are conquerors in the virtual world. Their enemy is absent, and pain and suffering are forbidden by the very nature of the game. They are so alienated that nothing, not even their common virtual battlefield, inhibits their giving themselves over to pure personal exploit, to securing victory over an enemy that does not exist. The driving concept behind our art is our perpetual attempt to precipitate the "genome of heroism" out of today's world of glimmer reality.
Part science fiction dream, part perverse fashion shoot - with these images, AES+F consider the possible relationships of the future, of war, industry, beauty and death.
Images courtesy the artists.
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Action Half Life, Episode 2#14, 2003. Inkjet on canvas, 150 x 120cm.
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Action Half Life, Episode 3#8, 2003. Inkjet on canvas, 150 x 450cm.
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