The World Upside Down

The world upside down, as visualized by artists, is one in which the symbolic order is turned on its head. This publication of a group exhibition surveys the strategy of symbolic inversion used by contemporary artists, while also providing historical context on Western and Indigenous North American traditions of inversion. As an artistic strategy, inversion illuminates and challenges the visual conventions that police social hierarchies. In each inversion documented here the artist turns a hierarchical dichotomy upside down. In most cases the dichotomy does not survive the experience, ultimately breaking down under the strain of its own absurdity and liberating us - if only for the moment - from its tyranny.