A caption to one of the many bewildering works in A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World reads: ‘A scientist in Russia has successfully engineered the luminescent gene of a fungi into a white tail deer in the hope of reducing the number of roadkill at night. The bioluminescence is extremely weak but is enough to be lit up by car headlights.’
Flip to another image, this time of two white African rhinoceroses with no horns, again in their natural habitat. Experts believe, we are told, that due to years of hunting, animals with smaller horns have been left to breed, resulting in a new generation of hornless rhinoceros. Elsewhere, photographs of square apples, this time shot in a studio, are described as being for sale in a department store in South Korea, intended as gifts for students taking the College Scholastic Ability Test, with some inscribed with the words ‘pass’ or ‘success’.
There’s nothing too out of the ordinary or dramatic to be witnessed here, but more often than not the written prompts we are given deliver a quick pang of incredibility. As viewers, we are left questioning the veracity of both the statements and the images to which they refer, and by extension, photography’s wider function as a system of representation.
Robert Zhao Renhui, who operates under the name The Institute of Critical Zoologists, creates bizarre but brilliant catalogues of animals and life-forms that have supposedly evolved in logical but unexpected ways. Infusing semblances of truth with fantastic tales of survival and evolution, the works show a planet attempting to cope and react to the ever-increasing pressures of a changing world.
Like a mad professor, the artist’s documentation and subsequent archive of quasi-scientific experiments resolve into a curious index of the forgotten, familiar and downright impossible. It’s a dysphoric yet oddly humorous vision, an encyclopaedia of environmental impacts that ultimately serves as a reminder of how the biggest threat to the human species is, of course, itself.
For more information or to order a copy visit criticalzoologists.org
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