Innocent images mimic reality

The children featured in Mixed Up Childhood’s video series King of the Forest woo the viewer with their innocence.

Collaborative art group AES+F started as AES in 1987, with artists Tatyana Avzamasova, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky. Vladimir Fridkes joined in 1995 and the group became AES+F.

Based in Moscow, their work explores the implications of globalisation. With conflict between Eastern and Western civilisations seemingly intensifying, this line of investigation is even more intriguing from the perspective of post-communist Russia.

AES+F's 1996 Islamic Project intermingled Eastern and Western iconography by manipulating tourist images and blurring fact and fiction through photo-manipulation.

Parodying Western anxiety of a potential Muslim threat, they simulated a veil and Koran on the Statue of Liberty, minarets and domes over London's parliament buildings and fighters of ambiguous origin along the fault-lines of Central and Eastern Europe.

Their contribution to last year's Sydney Biennale was the Action Half Life series. Large, glossy photo-montages featured armies of heroic children clad in white gym clothes and bearing hefty, futuristic weapons inspired by computer game armaments.

The Sinai Desert, a setting used for the Star Wars films, becomes a futuristic wasteland presided over by squads of aircraft and populated by children who are frozen in motion and arranged in the classically athletic poses typical of much socialist art.

"Our heroes are teenagers, emerging from the most 'heroic' of life's phases," reads a statement on the AES+F website. "The driving concept behind our art is our perpetual attempt to precipitate the genome of heroism out of today's world of grimmer reality."

The corporate language of advertising is vital to AES+F's commentary on the future, war, industry, beauty and death. The flawless children used in Action Half Life and the Mixed-Up Childhood video series King of the Forest were recruited from modelling agencies, ballet schools or sports clubs.

The King of the Forest takes its name from a medieval European folk-tale of a figure who would kidnap children and imprison them in his castle. It comprises three videos: a glittering Russian castle, an Egyptian mosque, and the clamour of traffic in New York.

Contrasted against this exotic, monumental architecture, ghostly midget armies dissolve in and out of focus in slow-motion processions accompanied by innocuous music.

Uniformly dressed in white, they perform in formation, echoing the mysterious rituals seen in Auckland Art Gallery's Shirin Neshat exhibition.

Mixing gender and race, these images mimic the way "United Colors" style media-imagery favours increasingly younger faces to draw an emotional hit with viewers.

Like the advertising it mimics, King of the Forest is more ambiguous than Action Half Life and the Islamic Project, wooing the viewer with innocent images that cunningly overlook the overt slogans of branding.

The Mixed Up Childhood curators refer to "the desecration of the image of a child" but AES+F also talk of their young performers as a culture of their own, separate from media portrayals of a sinister Islamic world and acting out their beautiful, mysterious rituals.

Exhibition

* What: AES+F in Mixed-Up Childhood

* Where and When: New Gallery, to May 29