AES+F
Angels-Demons

The work of the group of four Russ­ian artists AES+F: Tatiana Arza­maso­va, Lev Evzovich, Evge­ny Svy­atsky + Vladimir Frid­kes, pos­es philo­soph­i­cal and social ques­tions via a vari­ety of com­plex means includ­ing pho­tog­ra­phy, video and sculp­ture. The prophet­ic ele­ments in each of their projects are provoca­tive acts that chal­lenge habit­u­al con­cep­tions of good and evil, of sin and inno­cence. The work typ­i­cal­ly reflects a glob­al social-cul­tur­al sit­u­a­tion, as yet not man­i­fest, but per­haps impending.

The ​‘Angels-Demons’ in this exhi­bi­tion present a new vision of the apoc­a­lypse, one that her­alds not the end of the world, but the begin­ning of a new one. These sev­en large-scale, black, mir­ror fin­ished sculp­tures play with cul­tur­al anx­i­ety, by fus­ing two things every cul­ture has in com­mon: infants and demons. Mod­elled after babies of African, Asian and Indi­an descent, the gen­er­alised gen­der­less fig­ures are dressed only in nap­pies. Angel­ic wings and demon­ic tails sprout from each, sug­gest­ing youth to be both the sav­iours and the sabo­teurs of civil­i­sa­tion as we know it: har­bin­gers of an uncer­tain future for the declin­ing ​‘West’.

A typ­i­cal­ly ambigu­ous com­ment on the future of a rapid­ly expand­ing Europe, the work has its own res­o­nance in Aus­tralia, where AES+F recog­nise ten­sion between ​‘new arrivals’ of every peri­od in the continent’s his­to­ry. The artists decline to place them­selves in the debate that their for­mal­ly slick, aes­thet­i­cal­ly seduc­tive tableaux evoke, insist­ing instead that the work focus a lens on the unar­tic­u­lat­ed hopes and fears gen­er­at­ed by these ​“babies”.