AES+F
The Feast of Trimalchio

The mul­ti-media work of Russ­ian col­lec­tive AES+F inter­weaves imagery relat­ing to mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy, Hol­ly­wood cin­e­ma, fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, adver­tis­ing, death, reli­gion, mass media, pop­u­lar cul­ture and the youth obses­sion of con­tem­po­rary society.

The Feast of Tri­mal­chio, a body of work in pho­tog­ra­phy and mov­ing image, is an inter­pre­ta­tion of the wit­ty but melan­choly fic­tion ​‘Satyri­con’ by the Roman poet Petro­n­ius. In the ancient sto­ry Trimalchio’s feast was por­trayed as the ide­al cel­e­bra­tion that Tri­mal­chio imag­ined for his own funer­al. In AES+F’s 21^st Cen­tu­ry ver­sion, an orgy of con­sumerism reflects on the con­tem­po­rary state of Rus­sia and indeed the world. Cre­at­ed from over 75,000 pho­tographs, the com­plete work is a nine-chan­nel panoram­ic video that made its cel­e­brat­ed debut at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

For the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Arts Fes­ti­val, Anna Schwartz Gallery presents a set of three expan­sive pho­to­graph­ic tableaux. These cap­ti­vat­ing images of a tem­po­rary hotel par­adise por­tray opu­lence and excess over­shad­owed by a dark disquiet.