'The World Turned Upside Down' - a photo on Flickriver

LSE (London School of Economics and Political Science) is a place where people with different perspectives engage in respectful debate about major issues for the world. The World Turned Upside Down is a work of art by Mark Wallinger. It is his representation of the world in 2019. The designated borders, colours, and place names do not imply endorsement by LSE concerning the legal status of any territory or borders. There are many disputed borders and the artist has indicated some of these with an asterisk.

Located outside LSE’s Saw Swee Hock Student Centre, The World Turned Upside Down is a large political globe, four metres in diameter, with nation states and borders outlined but with the simple and revolutionary twist of being inverted. Most of the landmasses now lie in the ‘bottom’ hemisphere with the countries and cities re-labelled for this new orientation.

The name World Turned Upside Down comes from a 17th-century English ballad. The sculpture was unveiled in March 2019, and reportedly cost over £200,000, which was funded by alumni donations.

What becomes clear at this scale, and on a globe rather than the flat, rectangular Mercator projection we are used to seeing, is the proper scale of Africa in comparison with the other continents, and the vastness of the oceans.

Mark Wallinger, artist, said: “The UN is the authority as to the names and borders. This is the world, as we know it from a different viewpoint. Familiar, strange, and subject to change.”

Mark Wallinger, born Chigwell/UK 1959, has created some of the most subtly intelligent and influential artworks of the last thirty years. He is known for his career-long engagement with ideas of power, authority, artifice and illusion. Using epic narratives, lyrical metaphors and ardent punning, the artist interleaves the mythological, the political and the everyday. Stylistic disparity conceals a conceptual coherence, as Wallinger poses big questions about identity, and about the social, cultural and political power structures that guide us, and because of which we are as we are.

Wallinger was first nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, and won it in 2007 for his installation State Britain, an exact replica of peace campaigner Brian Haw’s protest camp in London’s Parliament Square. Ecce Homo (1999), a life-sized sculpture of Jesus Christ, was the first work to occupy the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. Wallinger represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the University of London. Founded in 1895 by Fabian Society members Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, Graham Wallas and George Bernard Shaw, LSE joined the University of London in 1900 and established its first degree courses under the auspices of the university in 1901. LSE began awarding its degrees in its own name in 2008, prior to which it awarded degrees of the University of London. It became a university in its own right within the University of London in 2022.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Turned_Upside_Down_(sculpture)

www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-news-from-LSE/2019/03-Mar-19/LS....

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_School_of_Economics

Taken in: UK / England / Camden / Holborn (show map)

Taken on: April 27, 2022

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