Crafted ▷ The Feast of Trimalchio by AES + F, 2010 | C-print

As the second part of The Liminal Space Trilogy, The Feast of Trimalchio is an ironic allegory of Heaven, taking its title from an eponymous fragment of Gaius Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon. Situated at an impossibly luxurious island resort that miraculously combines a tropical coastline with a ski slope, the work explores geopolitical, cultural, racial, and gender issues, weaving them into a single complex narrative that surveys the contemporary relationships between two key global socioeconomic classes: masters and servants. The masters are represented as the white-clad guests of the resort, their demographics reflecting more or less the distribution of global wealth. The servants are predominantly young and attractive representatives of the global South working in the vast hospitality industry, dressed in traditional uniforms with an ethnic twist. As the leisure time of the masters drags on, strict social roles slowly melt into ambiguity until they are fully reversed in the tradition of the Roman saturnalia. While many cataclysmic events take place in this Paradise, from a tsunami to an invasion by aliens, everything always reverts to an endless ritual of leisure and pleasure, in which the servants and the served alternate in perpetuity.

The Feast of Trimalchio was originally composed of a video installation in 9-channel, 3-channel, and single-channel versions, as well as a series of Allegories as large digital collages and 9 Panoramas that fit together into a single ultra-wide digital collage. Later the project also came to include a series of oil paintings, printed stills from the video, and portfolios of photographic source material. Visually referencing Mannerism, ancient Roman frescoes, and tourism advertisements, the video is accompanied by a classical soundtrack featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, with contemporary interludes commissioned from Pavel Karmanov.

The project was first shown in 2009 as a 9-channel video installation at the group exhibition Unconditional Love, an official accompanying event to the 53rd Venice Biennale, followed by the 17th Sydney Biennale, and a solo exhibition at Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010, where it was accompanied by the digital collages. In 2013 the project was displayed as part of the extensive survey exhibition of The Liminal Space Trilogy at Moscow’s Central Exhibition Hall “Manege” and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, which also included the paintings from the project. Since then, The Feast of Trimalchio has been shown in various configurations at many museums, galleries, and festivals around the world.