The Feast of Trimalchio

Russian collective AES+F produce large-scale digital video installations as well as photographic and sculptural works. Since 1987, AES+F have interwoven imagery relating to modern technology, Hollywood cinema, fashion photography, advertising, death, religion, the British Royal Family, mass media, popular culture and youth obsession throughout their work. They create hybrid worlds populated by strange mythic creatures that, from seemingly Olympian heights, touch on such worldly issues as consumerism, terrorism, and the gap between rich and poor.

The Feast of Trimalchio (2009) is a nine channel animation of over 75,000 photographs. With panoramic, immersive, sumptuous colour and a loud symphonic soundtrack, it depicts a contemporary version of a famous scene from Petronius’s Satyricon. In this neo-Brechtian twenty-first-century version, an orgy of consumerism reflects on the contemporary state of both Russia and the world. The Feast of Trimalchio was presented for the first time in Australia as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010) on Cockatoo Island.