Zero F*cks Given

From 31/10/2019 To 22/11/2019

Virtual Tour here.

What would you feel if you closed your laptop, ignored your telephone, switched off the television and stopped reading the newspapers?

What would go through your mind the next time you read about a school shooting, some new epidemic, the next outbreak of anti-Semitism?

Within the human conscience, our consciousness, several strategies have evolved to help us cope with the stresses brought on by the all-encompassing information glut and these strategies have diverged into two distinct categories:

The first are various types of analytical strategies (studies relating to new information sources within a digital culture, their cyclical nature, mechanisms, and reflections on how they impact society) as well as a multitude of activist-coping techniques (self-selecting ourselves into social sub-groups intent upon exerting influence upon various problematic phenomena: conducting rallies, participating in political events, environmentalism, social justice movements, charities, and creating radical modern art, etc.)

The second group neither attempts to understand nor to bridge the gaps between an idealized reality and an actual one, yet instead engages in various types

of escapism. One of the most prevalent of such forms is “philosophical escapism,” and focuses on the phenomenon of external objective reality.
It is the coexistence of these multiple strategies which is an essential sign of our times and clearly characterizes the modern social and cultural environment in which we live. One would have expected by the end of the second decade of the 21st century for one of the two strategies to have gained ground over the other and established its dominance, yet this has not been the case. Therefore, it is necessary to discuss the equivalence and internal connections which exist between the strategies. Activism, it seems, has become closely related to analysis and related theoretical concepts. Those who have chosen escapism as their strategy are still calling for something to be done, but what?

Dadaists and surrealists abandoned reality in favor of a hallucinatory super- reality, a place where the objective lost its meaning. In Russia, underground art movements such as “Collective Actions,” “New Artists,” and “Necrorealists” sought escape from traumatic reality into a world of the meaningless. Yet, how does one escape from their own boiling consciousness? From the little hell of your subjective space? Today, nearly all of the territories of the marginal have already been explored. It is only in an objective space, where phenomena are constant, that their nature and functioning are beyond humankind’s control.

The project, “Zero Fucks Given,” is dedicated to this idea of internal exclusion and of concentration on the phenomena of external objective reality. Uppermost in the author’s mind was to search for the tools and creative methodologies able to embody her commitment to the philosophical escapism reflected in the very name of this project, the main objective of which is to shift focus from a space of virtual information to one of objective objects and phenomena emanating from the real, material world. Digital photography possesses a wide range of opportunities for internal philosophical discourse, and, as such, has become the primary instrument to realize the stated goals of the Anna Dobrovolskaya-Mints Project.

It is Anna’s belief that digital photography loosens the bonds between the medium, the image, and its fragments when compared to the indivisible and singular nature of analog photography. Anna engages with these specific characteristics of digital photography according to her inner artistic vision. Her photographic process, from the first moments until the completion of post- processing, is to bring the final photographic image into the realm of idealized visual impression thereby creating an object which engenders a material memory impression in the mind of the observer.

Of primary importance to the Anna Dobrovolskaya-Mints Project is the assertion that the attribution of various properties can transform the perception of

time. For example, the effect that a split-image or the inclusion of several differing fragments from the past may have upon the plane of a single image. The images thereby created become, in themselves, philosophical objects which invite the observer to speculate about the properties of time itself and its role in objective space. The second component of the exhibition’s incarnation is the contrasting essence of printed screenshots of social network newsfeeds with pacifying photographic images. Each of the news fragments added to the framework of the exhibition is designed to engulf the observer with tension, to demand of the observer a response to the unspoken question which seeks to understand where the digital divide really lies. The spectral “information” space thereby belies its contrast with the objective space of real-time, of the material and inalterable, and demands reflection upon the extant character of the relationship between these two spaces.