AES+F: The King of the Forest

AES+F: The King of the Forest

17 March–15 April 200617 Mar–15 Apr 2006

Russian group AES+F (Tatiana Arzamosa, Lev Evzovitch, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes) are notorious for parodying the ideologies of our new world order. Their video trilogy The King of the Forest is based on the medieval European folktale of the Erl-King, who kidnaps beautiful children and holds them in his palace. Playing on the way advertising exploits children by attaching their appeal to diverse even contradictory products and principles, AES+F marshal cute children and film them in their whites in a mirror-lined palace in St Petersberg, a mosque in Cairo, and New York’s Times Square. Their point is that children are at once captured and captivating.