The Russian collective’s show, Inverso Mundus seems calculated to shock and disgust, but it delivers an empty performance of edginess
The film Inverso Mundus (2015), by the Berlin-based Russian collective AES+F, follows a long tradition of artworks depicting the world upside down. Etchings from as early as the sixteenth century show fish flying in the sky, horses riding humans and men nursing babies, among other role reversals that have offered sly challenges to existing norms. Likewise, AES+F’s 39-minute film animates highly stylised photographs and 3D renderings of absurd scenarios populated by unusual characters. Intriguing in concept but less so in execution, the film is the centrepiece of the collective’s bloodless solo show Inverso Mundus: City of Chimeras, which demonstrates the limits of social critique couched simplistically in the act of inversion.
Inverso Mundus consists of a series of unconnected vignettes set incongruously to music by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and other composers. The intricate melody of Bellini’s Casta Diva (1831) soundtracks scenes of impassive men being placed in metal stocks or strapped to giant hamster wheels by women in eveningwear who preside menacingly over them. In other sequences, old people spar with children in boxing matches and women fawn over mutant hybrids of domesticated and wild animals, including a tentacled ‘pugtopus’ and a hairless cat with batwings. A particularly tone-deaf scene has police officers engaging in a love-in with Black and Brown civilians. A bolder work could have taken this further to explore dynamics of power, race and desire, but Inverso Mundus never looks beyond the surface of its absurdities. The characters have no agency or purpose; they are simply moved around like so many Sims.
Inverso Mundus seems calculated to shock and disgust, but it delivers an empty performance of edginess. Inversion is not inherently subversive; it is weaponised by the powerful in false narratives of war that swap victim and aggressor, or in economic myths that cast billionaire tax-avoiders as heroes and workers as parasites. AES+F has described its practice as a form of ‘social psychoanalysis’, yet Inverso Mundus doesn’t have anything else to add to the conversations around violence, power, technology or the values of today; it merely presents a glossy unreality that borrows from the ‘uncanny valley’ aesthetics of videogames and AI-generated animation.
The strength of Inverso Mundus lies in the sheer weirdness of its ‘chimeras’, which drift aimlessly across simulated skies. These creatures are also portrayed in a series of new oil paintings such as the 5m-wide Inverso Mundus, Celestial Cities of Chimeras (2024), in which two-headed ‘sealdogs’ and ‘brainfish’ with boars’ bodies soar past heavenly bone-white citadels. There is a freewheeling irreverence to how AES+F takes elements of kitsch – baby seals, puppies, candy-coloured clouds – and transforms them into something monstrous; Inverso Mundus as an ongoing project is not without moments of fun and humour. The collective’s social observations are sharpest in a selection of portraits depicting smartly dressed women and children posing with various chimeras as though they are prized pets. Aping Baroque portraits of nobility, these works allude to the grotesque parading of wealth by elites as well as the commodification and corruption of nature to satisfy human vanity.
Yet there is little sense of evolution across this body of work in the decade since the film debuted. The new paintings replicate the same motifs, creating the impression that Inverso Mundus is not a reflection of the world we inhabit, but instead an ossified relic of another world altogether.
Inverso Mundus: City of Chimeras at Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong, 20 February – 20 March
