Look, fish flit among the trees, their scales glistening in the sun, cities - those intricate structures - levitate in the clouds, smooth-furred deer live underwater and calmly nibble on seagrass. Students teach humble professors, an ox deftly kills a butcher (humanely, of course, quickly and painlessly), a wagon stands in front of a horse, your belly is above your head... Or maybe people behave like animals, women and children go to war and the former victim turns into an executioner - sound familiar? With a little willpower, it's not all that hard to accept the world upside down as a real reality. This vision takes many forms. But what is particularly appealing to us is the perspective that offers the possibility of a kind of utopia, an alternative vision of a world that could be fundamentally different and yet fundamentally better. Although the word "better" also has many facets...

This upside-down view of the world has been known in culture since antiquity, and became very fashionable in the literature and visual arts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Interestingly and tellingly, its popularity grew especially during periods of tumultuous change. The landscape of absurdity, the materialization of nonsense - this parodic world was a tool used to expose the contradiction between ideals and the prose of life. On the principle of the fool's mirror, it parodied the hypocrisy of moralists, the cruelty of power or the dishonesty of officials. This is why the significance of this topos is so essential in the context of religious, social and political conflicts of different epochs. In fact, every era had its mirror image, needed as a kind of counterbalance. This vision included language, the concept of the body, the rewriting of relations between people - zeroing them out, reinventing them in a new, different, funnier, lighter, more imaginative way, becoming a space of very tangible freedom. A freedom that could actually happen, even if there was only one window of time in reality for it - the carnival.

So let us now assume that imagining the world inside out gives us the opportunity to test any alternative scenarios. Wear your dress inside out, put your pants on your head and come to Sibiř Gallery on Thursday, May 28.

artists: Tamara Conde @ tamaracondecrhova, Dominika Dobiášová @ dominikadobias_, Eva Jaronova @eva.jaronova, Ivana Rovenská, Alois Stratil @nedelamnic

concept design: Małgorzata Szandała

text: Małgorzata Szandała

curator: Max Lysáček