A group of photogenic young models in trainers and combat trousers move in stylised slow motion across a fantasy landscape to the strains of a Wagner opera. No, it's not the latest Calvin Klein ad campaign but Last Riot by the Russian art collective AES+F, a three-screen video installation that had people queueing around the block at last year's Venice Biennale. This epic, futuristic battle scene depicts sword-brandishing youths against an ever-changing backdrop. It's a sinister virtual world - a nightmarish computer game and Hollywood blockbuster rolled into one.

“We want to make art based on Mannerist and Baroque painting,” says Lev Evzovich, an AES+F member. “Contemporary visual culture is reminiscent of the Baroque school: expressive, figurative and decadent.” The art group even held a mass casting session in Moscow to find “Caravaggio transgendered types, masculine girls and effeminate young men”. The 45 paid participants in Last Riot were plucked from the capital's nightclubs, restaurants and even the Bolshoi Ballet School.

The digital collage has put the group firmly on the contemporary art map, with major museums worldwide snapping up their works, including the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The group has more than ten shows dotted around the globe this year, from Beijing to Salzburg. The most serious Russian collector of AES+F art is Shalva Breus, the owner of the influential art magazine ArtChronika, while the Tasmania-based winery owner David Walsh has snapped up an edition of Last Riot, reportedly for his new gallery, which will open on the Australian island next year. The collective now comes to London with its first solo UK show at the RS&A Ltd gallery.

But the group members are no strangers to the art world, with the founding members (Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich and Evgeny Svyatsky - A, E and S) joining forces in 1987. Evzovich and Arzamasova were married in 1982 after graduating from Moscow Architectural Institute. On meeting the couple in the late 1980s in their Moscow flat, Svyatsky, who trained as a book designer, jumped at the chance to be part of their “frenzied search for identity in a Russia dominated by perestroika art”, Evzovich says.

The 1991 project Decorative Anthropology, unveiled at the Kuskovo Memorial Estate palace in Moscow, set the theatrical tone of their art: large-scale kitsch paintings of male nudes were hung alongside installations made of blood transfusion syringes. But the trio took a different direction in 1995 when they became interested in “the aesthetics of fashion and advertising photography”. Vladimir Fridkes, a photographer whose images have been in Vogue and Marie Claire, came on board (he's the F).

The group found themselves in a storm of controversy with their first Photoshop experiment the following year, Islamic Project, in which minarets were superimposed on to iconic European and American landmarks such as Notre Dame in Paris. In one image, the Statue of Liberty was covered by a burka with the Declaration of Independence in her hand replaced by the Koran.

Evzovich insists that the pictures were “neither anti-Islamic nor anti-US but instead spoke about the overwhelming paranoia we saw in the media”. Post-9/11, the images were flashed across news reports and used by protesters against the war in Iraq in 2003. The project, first produced as a series of postcards in the late 1990s, had spun out of their control.

You'd think that one taboo topic would be enough, but in 1998 the group tackled the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, with the video Who Wants to Live Forever. An actress plays the late Princess, posing on a car seat and covered in blood. “We were in London when Princess Diana died and we were impressed by the medieval hysteria, like with a new saint,” Arzamasova says.

Evzovich bats away accusations of what seems like an endorsement of today's celebrity-driven culture, in ridiculously

opaque art-speak: “In our brilliant world, a person is oppressed by the excessiveness and availability of pleasure. We do not deconstruct this but look at it through a magnifying glass that takes us to a new grotesque, hallucinatory level.”

Their next project, Trimalchio, is currently being shot in an old film studio in Moscow with 120 models of all ages. Based on the Roman “novel” Satyricon by Petronius, the piece questions the roles of servants and guests in international hotels. Meanwhile, edgy new work on show in London will include a series of porcelain figurines, Europe- Europe, that pair incongruous figures such as an Arab teenager from the Paris suburbs with a riot policewoman. “We're asking if multiculturalism is possible in Europe today,” Evzovich says.

Four startling sculptural figures will be shown alongside the porcelain pieces. Based on scenes from Last Riot, the pristine white works show a succession of giant mutants, including a girl who has grown a dinosaur's tail.

The last, typically bizarre word goes to Evzovich: “In Apollo and Daphne Bernini solved a problem worthy of Hollywood's special-effects crews - how to turn Daphne into a tree. In Last Riot, we had a similar problem: how to make physiologically convincing teenager-mutants with the tail of a pangolin, wings and fins.” In their own way, they have more than met the challenge.

AES+F, RS&A Gallery, 50b Buttesland Street, London N1 (020-7253 7444), from Thursday until July 18

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