CRIPTA747, VIA CATANIA 15F, TURIN

03.07—27.09.2026

Azzeramento

Exhibition

Public Programme

Arsen Zhilyaev

OPENING Friday, July 3 from 6PM to 9PM

“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.
Through operations of counting, erasure, and transposition, the works reflect on the ways violence is recorded, administered, and transformed into numbers. Without offering redemption or resolution, Zeroing examines the relationship between language, power, and the procedures through which catastrophe becomes an object of calculation.

The exhibition includes texts by Anatoly Osmolovsky and Alessandra Franetovich.

In September, the exhibition will be further expanded by a public programme curated by Alessandra Franetovich and by a publication, both produced by Cripta747 in collaboration with C+N Gallery Canepaneri.

Arsen Zhilyaev (b. 1984, Voronezh, USSR. Lives and works in Venice) is an artist and organizer of gatherings, exhibitions, quests, and scripts for (future) histories through a variety of conceptual practices. His projects often take the form of (para)fictional institutions and use the museum as their medium. Zhilyaev plays roles in the Institute for Mastering of Time and the Institute of the Cosmos, while tracing the reflections of the Museum of Museums in the Venetian lagoon.

“Azzeramento” is realized with the support of Regione Piemonte and Fondazione CRT