In Your Face is a new exhibition to be installed at Art-Athina as part of a project in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Cuts upon invitation by Artemis Potamianou, Director of Platform Project @ Art-Athina. In Your Face is made of a series of visuals and sound works – screams – that play once every hour. The screams will be bought from people who have been hit the hardest by the economic crisis in Greece as well as abroad. As we go through a process of habituation the victims of the economic crisis are becoming more and more ‘invisible.’
Contemporary officialdom continues to presents a situation of ‘recovery,’ while the reality on the ground is that of increasingly impoverished populations. The voices of people have been silenced and displaced, as the political and economic games continue to enforce unsustainable working conditions and social cuts.
What is left in this panorama is the anger of those who are no longer heard and continue to be marginalized.
What does it mean to buy a scream today? Is it a further process of commodification and abuse or the opportunity to bring back focus on the inhumane conditions and the failures of democracy at the beginning of the XXIst century?
People are faced, more and more, with silence and political platitudes that try to silence all dissonant voices.
Arguably there is no longer space for dissent, since every aspect of human activity appears to be absorbed by capitalistic frameworks of exploitation; but this could be an argument that increasingly and insidiously favors silence, invisibility and disappearance.
As awkward, socially unpalatable, impolite, rude, disrespectful and disruptive screaming may be, it also manifests and renders audible the feelings and uncertainties that characterize contemporary Western societies, and Mediterranean countries in particular.
The artist, Lanfranco Aceti, will be buying a series of screams and these will be become part of the the installation and participatory performances at Art-Athina.
