Predictions and Revelations

AES+F
Predictions and Revelations

July 19—September 22, 2019

Manege Central Exhibition Hall
1 Isaakiyevskaya Ploshchad, St. Petersburg

Supported by MAMM

Manege Central Exhibition Hall and Triumph gallery present a major project by Russia’s finest, internationally acclaimed artists of the AES+F collective (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes). Working at the intersection of photography, video and digital technology, AES+F regularly draw from classical media, with a focus on sculpture as well as painting, drawing and architecture.

This exhibition spans more than two decades of work by the collective: from the Islamic Project, which began as early as 1996, to broadcast recordings of a Turandot restaging, which premiered this January at Massimo Theater in Palermo, Italy. On display also are signature projects by AES+F, including the grand The Liminal Space Trilogy—Last Riot (2005–2007, first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2007), The Feast of Trimalchio (2009–2010, first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2009), Allegoria Sacra (2011-2012)—and Inverso Mundus (2015-2017), first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015. The exposition features three sculpture series, Action Half-Life (2005–2006), The Last Riot (2007), and Angels-Demons (2009–2012).

AES+F. Predictions and Revelations totals over 70 works from 8 projects across different years: video installations, sculptures, carpets, digital collages.

Vast mystical worlds built by AES+F are informed by a deep understanding of the iconography, allegories and fine-art narratives. These inputs are shaped into an ultramodern social and cultural package that welcomes anyone who is beckoned by the hypnotic interplay of meanings. True visionaries as they are, AES+F go beyond simply shedding light on the global situation in its current state and make predictions for tomorrow too. The artists use a rich visual vocabulary, combining the aesthetics of the Baroque and Mannerism styles, to put together arrays of bright supercharged images (to which anyone can relate provided they are capable of at least some irony). Surrealistic phantasmagorias hypnotize the viewer and transplant them into a meta-space where our default binaries of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty, vice and virtue are not so certain anymore.

«We exist in a space where there are no more cultural boundaries, where different myths and traditions are decoupled from their origins and coexist in the new virtual space. The world is undergoing cultural osmosis whereby everything is gradually intermixed. Our works reflect this new reality.» — AES+F

In partnership with MTS