Allegoria Sacra, inspired by Giovanni Bellini’s mysterious painting of the same title, depicts a surreal world suspended in time, where passengers stuck in a futuristic airport drift into one another’s dreams. With a myriad of references to Bellini’s painting, as well as to global history and pop culture, the work allegorically uses the airport to refer to purgatory, where people from many walks of life congregate as they await their fate.
Inverso Mundus is based on the medieval engravings of a world upside-down, a comic strip from the middle ages depicting various social roles and norms reversed. AES+F’s epic video tableaux, like the medieval engravings, depicts a world where social conventions are inverted to highlight the underlying premises that we take for granted. In a whimsical reversal of the concept of the inquisition, women clad in cocktail dresses are sensually torturing men in cages and on devices styled after IKEA furniture. An international board of directors is usurped by their impoverished doppelgangers. The poor give alms to the rich. A pig guts a butcher. Virus-like objects loom over and settle on oblivious people who are taking selfies…