“One world approved thy wisdom; another, mine.” Antigone, Sophocles
Zero Fucks to Give is a work of art for Platforms Project, Athens, Greece, May 14-31, 2020. It consists of a talk, a manifesto, and a video performance. It is part of a larger set of artworks started in 2017 with the same title. Zero Fucks to Give: A Talk, a Manifesto, and a Work of Art revolves around the concept of personal freedom, right and wrong, and one’s standing within society. It explores aesthetic issues as well as the conditions within which artists and curators operate in the 2020’s.
This particular work of art, together with the series that it belongs to, encapsulates the reactions of those who have been socially distanced for a long time already. Distances within society have never been the same for everybody—forms of social distancing, seclusion, exclusion, and segregation have always existed and have become only too visibile in the past twenty years. The works of art face up to the hypocrisy of contemporary discourses and the idiotic aesthetic responses to the structures of social exploitation of contemporary advanced capitalism. This is a form of capitalism which announces its concern and willingness to show a more humane face only to revert back the policies of ‘society first’ as soon as they are no longer necessary to protect itself. Then, and only then—once out of danger—this capitalism reverts to long historical policies, never abandoned, of culling the masses. This last piroette happens when the danger is truly circumscribed to those who do not count or have ‘no relevance’ within society.
Therefore, the artist continues his exploration of themes related to social upheaval, labor exploitation, crises, racial and gender discrimination, political and economic failures, populism, anger, and violence—the apocalypse in a few words—not because of temporary fashionable fads, but because he has always been concerned with social inequality.
The video work, curated by Artemis Potamianou, announces an artwork within an artwork. Simultaneously to Zero Fucks to Give, Aceti announces a new body of work entitled Trans-Mutations. These new artworks consist of the artist shedding his physical form and becoming embodied for a biennium in someone else: a young Serbian artist, Dea Džanković. She is the performer and artist that Aceti has chosen to embody him in Zero Fucks to Give and to be the first body occupied for the first biennium of Trans-Mutations.
“The themes of the videos, layered through the complexity of recent events, bring the viewer through a journey that constantly challenges perceptions and established stereotypes,” said Artemis Potamianou, explaining the spectacle of truth as absurd reality realized by Aceti through what appears a simple video-talk format. She also added that “the work of art absurdly reveals the hypocrisy of our contemporary societies and at the same time offers a challenging view on the roles that we all play in the simulacral construction of art representation.”