[30][36][37] The figures struck poses echoing conventions of classical statuary, Social Realist portraiture and fascist art,[38][12][39] while bearing props (e.g., a laptop, fur coat, basket of apples, rifle, child) that marked them as ironic archetypes mocking consumerism, conformity and ultra-conservative values.

[31][40] Village Voice critic Vince Aletti called them "heroes for a society in flight from sex and desire, as scary as they are seductive";[36] Artweek's Tony Reveaux described the series as "right-wing political correctness stretched to its logical, anti-humanist conclusion.

[5][10] The large-scale photographs featured heads of regular men and women with smooth skin "grafted" over all their sense-organ orifices, rendering them vaguely alien yet still human in temperament (e.g., Maria, 1994–95); more troubling to critics was their sense of being sealed tight against the world, deaf, dumb, blind and possibly trapped—and pointedly, beyond pleasure and desire.

[10][6][8] With the exhibition "Plasmorphica" (1997, Jack Shainman Gallery), Aziz + Cucher made their first foray into sculpture, displaying biomorphic, hybrid objects on floor-to-ceiling poles alongside slick, product-display-like photographs of the same forms.

[3][45] In the "Synaptic Bliss" video and print works (2004–08), they moved toward the landscape and consciousness, seeking to evoke the human life force through a hallucinatory, artificial nature recalling psychedelic states of mind, which and blurred boundaries between inside and outside.

[1][13][48] In the show's multi-screen video installation The Time of the Empress, the duo presented loops of digitally animated, stripped-down modernist buildings (based on bombed-out structures shot in Bosnia) that rhythmically grew upward in tiny accumulating line segments and simultaneously collapsed from below into pixilated dust.

An expression of their refusal of silence, impotence, despair and the absurdity of wrestling with the madness of terrorism and Middle East conflict through art, the video chronicled them in everyday life (working, taking the subway, walking New York neighborhoods)—in the guise of "fools" wearing clown costumes the entire time.

[1][13][48] The duo extended these themes in their "Tapestries" cycle (2014–17) a series of collage-like Jacquard loom works, seeking to update the medieval European medium of pictorial narrative with their version of contemporary history paintings.

[13][2] In the installation You're Welcome and I'm Sorry (2019, MASS MoCA), Aziz + Cucher portrayed the polarizing effects of inequality and the absurdity of modern political theater, mocking neoconservative policies, white nationalist ideologies and claims of economic ignorance made by world leaders in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

[2][7] Placed within a room painted in circus stripes (the colors derived from bank logos), the six-channel video featured parodistic, whirling and orating business characters in costumes and masks made from repurposed shirts, ties, and deconstructed power suits.

They appeared in shifting, quasi-corporate environments (the World Economic Forum stage, Wall Street offices) alongside stock exchange banners, emojis and slot machines, accompanied by a soundtrack of financial verbiage and metal music.

[2] In these works on canvas, such as The Lobby (2022), they continued in the vein of the prior installation, combining satiric social commentary, bright colors, layered patterning, spatial disorientation and characters in tattered corporate wear and masks.

Brooklyn Rail critic Tennae Maki suggested the paintings brought their work around full circle: "the manic, oscillating mechanization found within the exhibition mirrors the very paradox that the artists have long endeavored to address.