First formed as AES Group in 1987 by Arzamasova, Evzovich, and Svyatsky, the collective became AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. Working at the intersection of traditional media, photography, video and digital technologies, the collective defines their practice as social psychoanalysis, revealing the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary global culture.

AES+F achieved worldwide critical acclaim in 1999 for their Islamic Project, which depicted various Western postcard city landscapes manipulated to appear colonized by Islamic culture. AES+F cemented their reputation as a contemporary art powerhouse in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Biennale di Venezia in 2007 with their provocative Last Riot, the first of their now signature large-scale, multichannel video installations. The following two large video installations titled The Feast of Trimalchio and Allegoria Sacra debuted at the 53rd Venice Biennale and 4th Moscow Biennale respectively. These three projects came to be known as The Liminal Space Trilogy, and were shown together for the first time in September 2012 at the Gropius Bau, Berlin. In 2015, AES+F premiered Inverso Mundus at the 56th Biennale di Venezia. Inverso Mundus was later shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennial, the Bangkok Biennial, and a number of other museums and festivals all over the world.

In 2019, with Italian opera director Fabio Cherstich, the collective premiered a reimagined Turandot at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, acclaimed by critics as audacious and visionary. Over the course of their prolific career the collective has also produced several sculptural projects at different scales, from monumental fiberglass Angels-Demons (2009), first shown in France at the Lille3000 festival, to miniature porcelain Mare Mediterraneum (2018), first presented at the Manifesta Biennial in Palermo.

For more than three decades, works by AES+F have been showcased in signature festivals of contemporary art around the world, such as the biennials of Venice, Sydney, Moscow, Gwangju, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi-Muziris, Lyon, Vancouver, and many others. AES+F works have also been exhibited at institutions and galleries, such as the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow), ZKM (Karlsruhe), HAM (Helsinki), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Tate Britain (London), MAXXI and MACRO Future (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madrid), Tang Contemporary Art (Beijing), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Leeum Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Faena Art Center (Buenos Aires), and many others.