In Your Face by Lanfranco Aceti is a new installation and series of artworks curated by Susanne Jaschko and Marquard Smith. The event is part of the Platform Project @ Art-Athina, Director Artemis Potamianou – May 15-18, 2014. The artist will buy 5 screams for fifty euros and resell them at 500,000 euros. In an age in which, after having been left at the margins of society, being heard is more difficult than being silenced, sound, in the form of a scream, pierces through institutional walls and forms of constriction. The sound of a scream is also a provocation, an insult, a cry for attention, a physically uncontainable message or the only other possible solution when all else is lost and anger is boiling.
The Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) at Art-Athina is presenting In Your Face by Lanfranco Aceti. The exhibition questions the silence that surrounds defeat, the private anger and the need for voicing, visually and vocally, contemporary social conditions. The show is also a moment of reflection on current frameworks of exploitation and abuse.
Is it possible to alter current frameworks of isolation? Is a scream, as expression of personal and social anger, enough to re-converge focus on the complex inherited realities of the contemporary economics and social crisis?
A series of performances will take place during Art-Athina.
On May 15 at 8:30pm, during the vernissage, 20 unemployed people will gather for a minute in the stand of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts and launch one scream in unison. For a moment the invisibility of the contemporary social conflicts will be rendered audible and visible. The performers, immediately after having launched the scream, will disperse and disappear into the audience, becoming yet again invisible within the crowds of visitors.
On May 18 at 2pm, 3pm and 4:30pm, screams bought by the artist will pierce through the routine-sounds of the fair in order to comment upon the habituation that the economic crisis has generated, making us unable to hear the plight of others and rendering people invisible.
As part of the Art-Athina Fair, Lanfranco Aceti on May 18 will also deliver a talk to discuss these issues. The talk is titled: In Your Face, Crass and Vulgar: The Scream of Contemporary Rebellious Art, Sunday, May 18, 2014 – 15.30 to 16.00 @ Art-Athina.
