Azzeramento

“Azzeramento” (“Zeroing”) presents a group of projects produced by Arsen Zhilyaev over recent years. For many of them, the starting point is a disappointment in art as a practice that promises, or is expected to promise, various forms of positive transformation, whether of the world or of art itself. If the artwork is often associated with hope and the possibility of a better future, the projects gathered in this exhibition emerge from a more modest assumption: art cannot save us from violence, suffering, or death. This does not imply a rejection of art. Rather, it suggests approaching it as a practice with its own life and its own logic of existence.

The exhibition’s title refers to the Russian word obnulenie obnulenie (zeroing), originally used to describe the constitutional changes that allowed Vladimir Putin to extend his time in power. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the term increasingly came to designate extrajudicial executions within the Russian military or, more generally, to function as a synonym for killing. In this double meaning – the political perpetuation of power and the destruction of human life – zeroing becomes one of the exhibition’s central figures.

The eponymous series is based on data collected by the BBC and the independent media outlet Mediazona, which have maintained an open record of confirmed Russian military deaths in the war against Ukraine since 24 February 2022. In these works, the artist visualises and crosses out zeros, assuming that each zero corresponds to one dead person. The zero appears simultaneously as a number, a graphic sign, and a unit of accounting. Statistics thus become more than a means of describing catastrophe; they function as one of the procedures through which death acquires an administrative form. Each figure testifies to the transformation of death into an object of calculation. The scale of the ongoing catastrophe is translated into the language of tables, records, and numerical operations, revealing the disturbing capacity of bureaucratic systems to order violence and convert human lives into statistical quantities.

Other projects in the exhibition continue this investigation into the relationship between language, political power, and abstraction. Among them are a work based on the symbolic removal of zeros from the federal budget of the Russian Federation and “Inni alle dichiarazioni delle parole della lingua russa” (“Anthems to the Declarative Statements of the Words of the Russian Language”), a project composed of translations of a text derived from Alexander Brener’s anti-war letter against the war in Chechnya, in which the words of the Russian language themselves become speaking subjects. In these works, numbers, documents, translations, and linguistic constructions are treated not simply as representational tools but as materials for artistic practice.

Without proposing a programme of action or a form of redemption, “Azzeramento” turns to the ways language, numbers, and administrative procedures continue to operate against the backdrop of war, political violence, and historical catastrophe.

“Azzeramento” includes texts by Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alessandra Franetovich.

Transforming into Zero

Text by Alessandra Franetovich, published on the occasion of the exhibition “Azzeramento” by Arsen Zhilyaev, Cripta747, Turin, July 2026. 

“Azzeramento” (“Zeroing”) is an ongoing work conceived by Arsen Zhilyaev to bear witness to the enduring consequences of Russia's war against Ukraine. Spanning the period from July to September 2026, the installation unfolds through a continuous process of data collection and constant updating, unequivocally recording information about the deaths of Russian soldiers at the front. These are facts that remain undisclosed or concealed from the Russian public and have become known through the investigations of BBC and Mediazona. As this register of deaths expands, Zhilyaev narrates and gives visual form to the catastrophe unfolding in Russia, where war and its casualties are increasingly subjected to processes of bureaucratisation, enabled by a long-standing tradition of dehumanisation rooted in Soviet and post-Soviet history.

The work emerges within a climate characterized by a decade of fear fuelled by the Russian state's repression of the artistic and cultural sphere, as well as of independent journalism, all of which have been accused of expressing criticism of authoritarian policies. As a result of the repression, since 24 February 2022 numerous cases of exile, imprisonment, intimidation and pre-emptive self-censorship have continued to affect those who have publicly criticised the war – developments that have largely unfolded before the eyes of a generally silent Europe. In a country where holding up a blank sheet of paper in a public square can lead to arrest for an act against the state – as an expression of an unacceptable form of pacifism – those who resist the dehumanisation of people killed in the war are accused of profiting from their research, of building personal well-being upon the bodies of those who have suffered. As the writer, journalist and human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who reported extensively on the Second Chechen War, observed before she was brutally murdered on 7 October 2006: «Don't worry about feeding people, but be sure to place a wreath on their graves»¹.1 The necropolitics of war (Achille Mbembe) thus becomes an untouchable subject – one that exposes the contradictions and vulnerabilities of power, demanding the concealment of reality, while simultaneously constituting a crucial site from which to formulate accusations and imagine a radical transformation of Russian society.

The ambiguity underlying both the creation and interpretation of the artwork is situated within this fracture, nurturing doubt and uncertainty and, to borrow Zhilyaev's own words, the awareness that art, too, ultimately fails and lacks the power to bring about the egalitarian and peaceful society to which it aspires. Yet despite the artist's pessimism – shaped through years of research into the role of language in the various forms of subjugation and reinterpretation that have emerged in Russia since 2022 – a fundamental connection persists between artistic labour and the construction of society, between politics and the role of the individual as it becomes collective. The work thus opens the possibility of a shared reflection around a gesture – in this case an artistic one – intended to expose a fracture while simultaneously attempting to reconstruct, beneath, around and above it, a space of equal encounter.

This act of protest takes the form of the zero: both a graphic sign and a symbol through which Zhilyaev identifies fallen soldiers, exposing the cruelty of state calculation and numerical abstraction when confronted with lost lives, while simultaneously referring to the political terminology employed in relation to Putin's re-election. This transfiguration of form – the aspiration towards zero, towards nothingness as an absolute concept – recalls the artistic theories of Kazimir Malevich, a leading figure of the Russian avant-garde, whose objective conception of art was grounded in abstract research where every element constituted a possible point of access to a metaphysical and scientific reality beyond the visible, yet remained fundamentally modernist. Malevich himself experienced the consolidation of the Soviet Union from the 1920s onwards and the establishment of a critical museology aimed first at denouncing and later concealing avant-garde works, which were deemed bourgeois and anti-Soviet in contrast with the values of Socialist Realism, officially established as the sole state-sanctioned artistic language in 1934. Zero thus becomes a modus operandi: an act of erasure inseparable from an act of construction, and consequently a point of convergence between the pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet eras, affirming the continuity already identified by Boris Groys in 1989. 

This is likewise an uncertain and ambiguous territory, one that resonates with the work of Alexander Brener, an artist associated with Russian Actionism, whose performances and writings sought to dismantle both political and artistic institutions in favour of a radical transformation of values. In 1997 he intervened on a painting by Malevich held at the Stedelijk Museum, spraying a green dollar sign across its surface. The episode became emblematic of the incorporation of Russian art into the global market, of financial speculation and the degradation of artistic practice. Widely reported in the specialised art press, Brener was arrested and imprisoned in the Netherlands for five months after the act was classified as vandalism. Yet two years earlier he had initiated a series of actions protesting the First Chechen War, staging public performances, writing extensively, and exposing an unfolding social scandal and humanitarian tragedy. Among these lesser-known works in the West is “First Glove”, in which the artist, dressed as a boxer, entered Red Square to publicly challenge president Boris Yeltsin.

Underlying this confrontation with a symbol – which is equally a struggle against a form of power that remains invisible except through the consequences of its destructive policies, retreating into isolation to avoid confrontation and the risk of its own annihilation – lies much of the critical activity directed against the Russian state: a continuous mobilisation of energy and effort undertaken at considerable personal risk against a form of oppression and power that is at once omnipresent and ultimately elusive.

¹ Anna Politkovskaya, “Land of the Unknown Soldiers”, in “The Essential Anna Politkovskaya”, London, Penguin Random House, 2026, p. 10.

The true conflict of our time

A text by Anatoly Osmolovsky, published on the occasion of the exhibition “Azzeramento” by Arsen Zhilyaev, Cripta747, Turin, July 2026.

Every exhibition by a good artist is an occasion to reflect on artistic method. Arsen Zhilyaev explores a new slang term: zeroing. Zeroing is a euphemism for killing, elimination, extrajudicial execution. In the Russian language there are numerous terms used to describe these crimes; one might even say that each generation has invented its own word. Today it is zeroing. An interesting term, which carries a multiplicity of implicit meanings. One of the methods of the contemporary artist consists precisely in bringing these meanings to light. In this sense, the process is reminiscent of paranoid delusion. A person in a psychotic state also connects seemingly incompatible entities, relying on absurd argumentation. In most cases, however, such delusion is trivial – megalomania or persecution mania – and its logic is random and meaningless.

The artist, by contrast, seeks sharper, more precise, or paradoxical connections. Art here lies precisely in the vivid and compelling formula that describes both the situation and the reality, diagnosing its time. What, then, is Zhilyaev’s formula? Zeroing refers first of all to zero as an economic indicator: adding or removing zeros in financial statements is a universal method both of corruption and of “unintentional” errors.

It also refers to the digital code of computers: 0 and 1. It is well known that digital virtual reality is entirely based on binary code. Everything is encoded through this sequence of zeros and ones. The connection between this code and “zeroing” – which, in its essence, also expresses the lethal code of war, life or death – introduces into digital reality a tragic awareness of the finitude of matter. And yet the digital stubbornly continues to produce the illusion of its own immateriality, leading us to forget that, as Boris Groys has observed, the materiality of the digital is electricity (a point made by Groys in his commentary on an action by Oleg Mavromatti, who organized an online vote in which “likes” and “dislikes” were meant to determine the delivery of a potentially lethal electric shock on a self-built electric chair). But where does this bodily materiality of the digital appear today in the space of war? In power plants. In energy infrastructure. These are precisely among the main targets of Russian missile strikes against Ukraine. Striking electricity, understood as the foundation of digital reality, with analog missiles. In this sense, war can be interpreted as a conflict between the material and the digital. A conflict generated by an excessively abrupt separation of the digital from its material base (note that Putin still reads from paper folders and does not know how to use a computer). This rupture is the true conflict of our time.