The Museum of Cycladic Art presents for the first time in Greece, the national participation in the 55th Venice Biennale, Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ History Zero.

The piece comprises of a film structured in three parts (each 11 minutes), accompanied by an archive of 32 texts and imagery with alternative non-monetary exchange systems. The theme includes the concept of money, the value of material goods today and the alternative exchange systems.

The film depicts the experiences of three people, with very different conceptions of the value of money. Its narrative explores the effect that monetary exchange can have in human relations, as well as the political and social implications. It shows a young immigrant from Africa wandering around in the streets of Athens pushing a supermarket trolley and collecting scrap metal, a foreign artist who visits Athens seeking inspiration for his new art piece in the confusing landscape of the city, and an elderly art collector who suffers from dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease and lives all alone in her museum-like house surrounded by artworks of contemporary art. The initial unrelated stories of these three heroes connect through small random events.

The film is presented exactly as in the Greek Pavilion with some necessary changes to the scale of the exhibits. Also, there is a set of 7 new archives of ‘alternative currencies’ that examine the history of currency in Greece from the Obol to the Euro. These new archives are especially designed for the Museum of Cycladic Art.

Stefanos Tsivopoulos (b. 1973, Prague) lives and works in Amsterdam and New York. His work refers mainly to the past, to the collective and individual memory, the genius loci and the types of reasoning that developed in the public domain. The technology of imagery, television aesthetics and historic authenticity of the cinematographic work, are parallel areas of research and interest for the creator. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam.