BERLIN.- Miss AI posing next to Barbie and Beyoncé; Saint Sebastian reimagined as a young nomad returning from the exotic South; refugees climbing aboard a boat on the river Styx; a delegation of Chinese executives gathered around a centaur after a plane crash in the middle of a snowy, liminal purgatory. In the hyperreality of consumer mass culture, simulations are no longer mere copies of the real—they replace the real.

The exhibition Longing and Misery in Culture and Mass Media presents a dialogue between the simulacral realms of German artist Margret Eicher and the Russian art collective AES+F—composed of Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes. Eicher’s large-format tapestries form a visual epic that actively engages with the hallucinatory postmodern narratives of the mass media universe depicted in AES+F’s monumental digital installation. The bold pictorial language shared by the artists creates a compelling arc of tension between their image-scapes, set against apocalyptic global perspectives—where news becomes spectacle, reality TV presents scripted events as “real life,” and advertising no longer sells products, but our most intimate fantasies.

Longing and Misery in Culture and Mass Media speculates a world where the real disappears and truth becomes irrelevant. Engaged in a critical exploration of Western ideology, the artists draw on classical and contemporary references to play with fragmented temporalities, constructing absurd scenarios that reveal the contradictions of neoliberal politics. AES+F’s digital painting Allegoria Sacra, a reference to Giovanni Bellini’s eponymous work, blends media clichés and biblical imagery with characters from different eras, all trapped between fictions. The movements of the protagonists are dramatically exaggerated, their gazes glassy and detached—reminiscent of figures in canonical religious paintings. From identity and otherness to evolving economic hegemonies and geopolitical unrest, as well as transhumanism and climate change, Allegoria Sacra threads together complex sociopolitical issues, meditating on the wholesale transformation of postcolonial civilization driven by the demands of the global market economy.

In Eicher’s tapestry Interculturalists Have Arrived!, dark-skinned Barbie, Beyoncé, and last year's Miss AI—a Moroccan lifestyle influencer, Kenza Layli—are depicted on an alien planet, surrounded by AI-generated rodents. Rather than signaling real progress toward racial diversity and inclusion, these figures appear as hollow holograms of Western feminism, molded by white, middle-class standards. In the background, the ruins of the former American espionage facility on Berlin’s Teufelsberg cut through the futuristic fantasy, anchoring it in historical time and evoking a sense of fading nostalgia.

The multilayered, synthetic worlds displayed within the walls of the Michael Janssen gallery are replete with intricate meta-jokes and conceptual quotations. The tapestry After the Hunt is based on Thomas Gainsborough’s 18th-century painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which depicts a wealthy couple posed before their estate. Eicher ironically alters the composition by placing American rapper Snoop Dogg beside Mr. Andrews, occupying the space where the young wife once sat. The woman is now shown kneeling naked in the lower right corner of the tapestry, mirroring a hunting dog—both gazing up at the “masters,” Mr. Andrews and Snoop Dogg, with an air of loyalty and a desire to serve. While the original painting reflects the relationship between property and art in the European visual tradition, Eicher’s After the Hunt extends this relationship into the present, revealing how little the dynamics of power have shifted since then.

In the displayed artworks, the pursuit of pleasure and entertainment is often embodied through video game aesthetics, which conceptually frame several of Eicher’s tapestries, including Das große Rasenstück, The Age of Styx, and the previously mentioned Interculturalists Have Arrived!. These works playfully juxtapose the materiality of traditional tapestry with the elusive virtuality of gamer fiction.

The artists of AES+F, in turn, translate the virtual realm into tangible sculptures to distill a genealogy of contemporary iconography surrounding heroism—understood as a total effect of ideology and the militarization of the body. The sleek, flawless corporeality of the Warrior sculpture from the Action Half Life series—its title borrowed from the 90s shooter video game—encapsulates the collective obsession with youth and beauty within fetishistic culture, fueled by the endless consumption of symbols of status. Frozen in a bellicose posture, echoing early Renaissance depictions of David, the golden boy grips heavy futuristic weaponry in his hand, wearing virtual reality headgear as an homage to the aesthetic language of popular Hollywood sci-fi films.

The children in AES+F's works embrace a forgotten Other—the selves we once were. In the exponential growth of virtuality, the polished futuristic sculptures of androgynous youth reflect the disassociation between real violence and its glorified representation in media and video games. However, in this war simulation, the loss is real, and the stakes are the future.

Longing and Misery in Culture and Mass Media is an overwhelming journey into the world of signs and symbols that become self-referential, self-sufficient, and often more convincing than reality. The scenes unfold before the spectator in their schizophrenic cacophony, saturating the visual experience to the point of vertigo. In this semi-fictional universe the real is merely the residual effect of simulation.

Text: Karina Abdusamalova