"Inverso Mundus" Automatic translate

The State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan, with the support of the Triumph Gallery (Moscow), presents the exhibition "Inverso Mundus" by AES + F artists (Tatyana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, Vladimir Fridkes). The AES + F video project “Inverso Mundus” was first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2015. The show was supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation, Faena Art Center and Triumph Gallery. The project will feature a 3-channel video installation “Inverso Mundus”, as well as 12 illusionistic digital prints, a large-scale panorama of “Inquisition” and 4 objects of “instruments of torture”.

Back in the sixteenth century, stories in painting and engravings on the theme of the “Inverted World” (Upsidedown World) were popular, representing a kind of joke, an irony that ridicules the absurdities of the world. They showed scenes where a pig refreshes a butcher, a child punishes his teacher, a man carries a donkey on his shoulders, etc. These engravings included images of chimeras, demons, fish flying through the sky and, in fact, death.

In the interpretation of AES + F, the absurd scenes of a medieval carnival look like episodes of modern life in a multi-channel video installation. The characters act out scenes of absurd social utopias and change masks, transforming from beggars to rich, from policemen to thieves. Metrosexual street cleaners dump the city with waste. Female Inquisitors torture men at IKEA-style facilities. Children and senior citizens participate in a kickboxing match. Changeling characters exist and act in the scenery of the city outskirts, in the boudoir of the palace, in the corporate meeting room on the top floor of a skyscraper, on the streets of a big city. Inverso Mundus is a world where chimeras are pets and the Apocalypse is entertainment.

AES + F

Conceptual architects Tatyana Arzamasova and Lev Evzovich, as well as graphic designer Evgeny Svyatsky formed the AES group in 1987. The group took part in exhibitions outside of Russia since 1989, in 1995 a new member joined it - photographer Vladimir Fridkes, and its name began to sound like AES + F. Currently, AES + F create their work at the junction of photography, video and digital technology, but constantly pay attention to traditional techniques, especially sculpture, as well as painting, drawing and architecture. Developing a complex, poetic dialogue between these media and plunging into the depths of the history of art and cultural canons, the ambitious visual narratives of AES + F explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture on a global scale.

AES + F gained worldwide recognition when they presented the provocative, mesmerizing project “The Last Uprising” (2007) at the Russian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first of three large-scale multi-channel video installations demonstrating the vivid originality of the AES + F aesthetics, as well as the possibilities latest technology. The second work in the series, Feast of Trimalchio (2009), was also shown in Venice in 2009, and the third, Allegoria Sacra, debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. Combined in the Liminal Space Trilogy, this shock series was first presented in September 2012 simultaneously at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin and at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow, the artists’ hometown. The trilogy was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland (2014), at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2015), and at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, Switzerland (2018). In 2015, AES + F presented the Inverso Mundus project at the 56th Venice Biennale. AES + F received the Sergey Kuryokhin Award 2011, the main prize of the Kandinsky Prize 2012, the main award of the NordArt 2014 festival, as well as the Pino Pascali 2015 award - all for the Allegoria Sacra project. AES + F were awarded the Bronze (2005) and Golden (2013) medals of the Russian Academy of Arts.

AES + F participated in a number of major festivals and biennials of contemporary art around the world, including, except for Moscow and Venice, in Adelaide, Bangkok, Gwangju, Havana, Istanbul, Kiev, Cochin, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, St. Moritz, Sydney, Taipei, Tirana, Toronto, and Helsinki. Their work was also shown at important events focusing on new media - such as ARS Electronica (Linz), MediaCity (Seoul) and Video Zone (Tel Aviv), and photographs - FotoFest (Houston), Les Recontres d’Arles (Arles), and at the Moscow Photobiennale.

Over 100 solo exhibitions have been held at museums, exhibition halls and commercial galleries around the world. AES + F works were exhibited in such prestigious places as Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin), Casino Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Kiasma (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA, various cities of Great Britain), Passage De Retz (Paris), Vanhaerents collection (Brussels), MACRO Future (Rome), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow) and many others. AES + F works are stored in collections of major European museums and galleries such as Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Sammlung Goetz (Munich), Neue Galerie (Graz), the European House of Photography (Paris) and the Georges Pompidou Center (Paris). Their works are also in the largest collections in Russia, including the MAMM, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), the State Russian Museum - Ludwig’s collections (St. Petersburg).

Gallery "Triumph"

The gallery was founded by Emelyan Zakharov and Dmitry Khankin in 2006. The gallery is engaged in contemporary art and works with major Russian and foreign artists. The most famous Russian artists of the gallery: AES + F, Alexander Brodsky, Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubosarsky, Alexey Belyaev-Gintovt, Recycle Group. In 2006, Triumph first presented to the Moscow public the work of one of the most famous contemporary artists Demien Hirst, and a year later a personal exhibition of the scandalous Jake and Dinos Chepmenov took place in the gallery.

The gallery supports young art as part of its own Launchpad project, and the Method Gallery’s daily project presents double exhibitions by artists who work with the same media or use similar techniques and visual techniques.

In addition to projects in its own space, Triumph oversees major exhibitions in Russia and abroad, and also supports young art. In 2013–2015 in conjunction with the Manege MBO and the MediaArtLab Culture Center, the gallery organizes two cycles of the Great Expectations and Fathers and Children exhibitions, in the framework of which a generation of modern media artists was presented to the general public. In 2013, the gallery founded the Department of Research Arts, an interdisciplinary scientific and art project specializing in organizing interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of contemporary art and the humanities. In 2015, especially for young artists, the gallery launched a grant program “Young Lions”, in which the authors get the opportunity to present the project at the MMOMA site.

In 2015, Triumph Gallery presented solo exhibitions AES + F and Recycle Group as part of the parallel program of the 56th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art.