With their smooth skin and bright eyes, these boys and girls have a beautiful, innocent look. But look closer and you'll see they are doing disturbing, wicked things: toying with rocket-propelled grenades, strangling and torturing each other.
Such are the strange but compelling images created by AES+F, a collective of four Moscow-based artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. Their works, titled Action Half Life and Last Riot, explore issues of youth, beauty, heroism, violence and war.
'The artworks speak about our world,' says Evzovich, who was recently in Hong Kong with Svyatsky and Fridkes to attend the opening of their exhibition at the Art Statements Gallery, their first solo show in Asia. 'It looks glossy and beautiful on the outside, but it has a bitter, traumatic meaning inside.'
The exhibition features photographic prints, digital prints on canvases and a video animation from the two series, and runs simultaneously with their other shows at two art events. One is at the Istanbul Biennial, which ends today, the other is at the Venice Biennale until November 21. (It's part of the Russian pavilion, curated by Olga Sviblova, the director of Multimedia Art Centre in Moscow.)
While it's tempting to link the works - Action Half Life began in 2003 and Last Riot in 2005 - with ongoing events, from the terrorist attacks to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the artistic inspiration comes from elsewhere.
The body language and the facial expression of the models resemble the styles in fashion photography, propaganda art and old European master paintings. There is also a dose of electronic games and Hollywood blockbusters thrown into the mixture.
