Zevs
* born in Saverne, France
* today lives and works in Paris, France
* adbusting, installations, collages
The French artist Zevs has surely become just as well-known to a wide audience as Banksy after his Visual Kidnapping, which was widely covered by the media, for the Sharjah Biennale 2004 in Berlin. This work targeted an advertising banner for the Lavazza company which had been affixed in a prominent location and showed a model in large format. Zevs cut out the ten-meter-tall lady along her contours, leaving the now-severed banner with the painted message “PAY NOW!” during his nighttime action. The artist concurrently sent a blackmail letter, including ransom demand, to the company headquarters in Italy. To emphasize the seriousness of his demand, the artist included in the envelope a finger amputated from the paper model and started exhibiting his hostage in museums, galleries, and on the Internet. Eventually, heightened public pressure forced the company being blackmailed to actually donate the stipulated amount (a six-digit euro figure) to the Palays de Tokyo.
Through his work on this art project and similar ones, Parisian artist Zevs is closely associated with adbusting practices or with culture jamming. In line with the style of such guerrilla communication tactics, Zevs again and again tries to disrupt established means of communication and perceptual habits by alienating signs and symbols, calling their meaning into question, or even ironizing economic structures to the point of absurdity. This is, for instance, easily recognizable in his so-called Liquidated Logos.
