Inverso Mundus — AES + F

During the Artissima period, Recontemporary is happy to present the exhibition Inverso Mundus realized in collaboration with Galeria Senda of Barcelona and Mon Viewing Room by Michele Forneris, with the technical support of Vi.Ma. The work is signed by the collective AES + F, artists who have represented Russia on various occasions and events such as the Venice and Sao Paulo Biennales, and who have now openly distanced themselves from the policies of their country. A choice aimed at supporting artistic production regardless of the country of origin.

Inverso Mundus is a critique of the dystopian situation we are living in today, between climate, social and economic crisis, exploitation and gender inequality. The video work, lasting about 40 minutes, is presented with a setup specifically designed by designer Andrea Isola with the contribution of the participants in the Exhibit Design workshop organized by Recontemporary in the days immediately preceding the inauguration.

To enrich the exhibition, the suggestive Mon Viewing Room of the collector Michele Forneris, hosts in collaboration with Recontemporary another work by the artists, which can be visited by appointment by sending an email to spaziomon@gmail.com.

The exhibition has as its initial point of reference the carnival engravings of the 16th century in the genre of the “upside-down world”, an early form of populist social criticism that emerged with the advent of the Gutenberg press. The project’s title mixes ancient Italian and Latin, based on a centuries-old layering of meanings, combining Inverso, the Italian for “rovescio” and ancient Italian “poesia”, with the Latin Mundus, meaning “world”.

Inverso Mundus reinterprets contemporaneity through the tradition of printmaking, depicting a contemporary world consumed by a tragicomic apocalypse where social conventions are turned upside down to highlight the underlying premises we take for granted. Metrosexual street cleaners douse the streets with sewage and waste. An international board of directors is usurped by their impoverished doppelgangers. The poor beg the rich. Chimeras descend from the sky to be petted like pets. A pig disembowels a butcher. Women dressed in cocktail dresses sensually torture men in cages and on IKEA-inspired devices in an ironic reversal of the Inquisition. Pre-teens and octogenarians fight a kickboxing match. Riot police embrace protesters in an orgy on a giant luxury bed. Men and women carrying donkeys on their backs and radiolarians resembling the viruses in Haeckel’s illustrations loom and settle on unsuspecting, selfie-taking people. The video’s background music is an amalgam of Léon Boëllmann’s Gothique from 1895, an original piece by contemporary composer and media artist Dmitry Morozov (also known as VTOL), along with excerpts from Ravel, Liszt, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, with a special emphasis on “Casta Diva” from Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma.

Psychosis, on the other hand, tackles 90s themes such as corporeality, psychedelics and social protest, through the prism of digital technologies and contemporary aesthetics. The project takes inspiration from the text of the play 4:48 Psychosis by cult British playwright Sarah Kane, written by her in a psychiatric clinic in early 1999, shortly before her suicide. Kane suffered from clinical depression and crippling self-loathing, her final play is often interpreted as a projection of her mental state as she struggled with an insatiable desire for love and simultaneously contemplated taking her own life.

Together with Alexander Zeldovich, AES+F first reimagined the show for the Stanislavsky Moscow Electrotheater with an original concept performed as a cacophony of 19 voices and an entirely CGI video scenography with a modular system of screens. The collective subsequently produced a mixed reality installation with a performative component, as well as a standalone video work derived from their scenography. The music and sound effects for both the stage performance and subsequent installations were composed by Dmitry Kourliandski based on micro fragments of Brahms’ German Requiem. The viewer is transported into the surreal visions of Sarah Kane’s protagonist, embarking on a journey. The single-channel video work is more closely based on the scenography, employing the same visual material, its narrative structure loosely aligned with that of the stage show. The poetics of the images oscillate between the fairy-tale and the terrifying, full of images of the female body, blood, black snow, mushrooms and cockroaches. The single channel video installation premiered at Ca’Foscari University in Venice during ArtNight in 2017, while the mixed reality installation was first shown in Moscow at Center Mars and later traveled to the Rencontres d’Arles 2018 festival in France and the Geneva International Film Festival in 2019.

The works are a reference to the current situation of sudden changes and extreme instability, a moment in which more than ever it is necessary to be carried away by the communicative power of art and its power to unite and make people reflect, synthesizing universal messages.