Art exhibition explores digital dreamscape

Digital artworks that have dazzled visitors at the Venice and Sydney Biennales feature in the latest exhibition to open at The University of Queensland.

AES+F: THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! includes two major video installations by the renowned Russian art collective – The Feast of Trimalchio and Last Riot 2 – alongside a new series of large-scale digital “paintings”.

Spectacular effects are created with groundbreaking digital production techniques, using the visual language of high fashion, advertising and luxury design, intermixed with references to the history of art.

“The work of AES+F has been critically acclaimed not only at the two most recent Venice Biennales, but also at this year’s Sydney Biennale,” UQ Art Museum Director Nick Mitzevich said.

The Feast of Trimalchio is a sumptuous interpretation of the Satyricon by Petronius, the Roman poet of Nero’s reign.

The work is set at a luxury hotel on a fantasy island location where the human characters are depicted as automatons.

A cast featuring different ethnicities is arranged in a series of elaborate tableaux, accompanied by a score from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

“AES+F brings the slickness of an advertising campaign to the depiction of this pleasure palace, but they also undercut it with the constant threat of catastrophe,” Mr Mitzevich said.

“This work is a commentary on global greed and inequalities, on Russia’s new capitalism, and on our capacity to ignore wider threats, such as environmental disasters.”

AES+F is made up of the surname initials of the collaborating artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich and Evgeny Svyatsky (who started working together in 1987 as AES) and Vladimir Fridkes (who joined the group in 1995).

The exhibition’s opening on July 9 marks Mr Mitzevich’s last official event at UQ before taking up his new position as the Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

As curator, Mr Mitzevich travelled to Moscow earlier this year to meet the artists, assisted by a grant from the Gordon Darling Foundation.

AES+F: THE REVOLUTION STARTS NOW! continues until August 29. The UQ Art Museum is open free to the public daily from 10.00am–4.00pm.

Media: Nick Mitzevich until July 9 (07 3346 8787, n.mitzevich@uq.edu.au) or Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)