ROME.- ADA is presenting Witting Vitium, Madison Bycroft’s first solo exhibition in Italy.
The short film The Sauce of All Order orbits the Augur, an Ancient Roman figure whose job it was to interpret specific signs in their environment, and report their interpretations to the state. The signs included the flight pattern of birds, the pecking of sacred chicken, the direction of lightning, unexpected sonic interruptions (a burp or sneeze for example), as well as the close inspection of the entrails of sacrificial animals. Reading the auspices followed a system and strict codes guided interpretation, outlining what was a sign and its meaning. But misinterpretation was frequent, and at times, even purposeful: knowing that an emperor wanted to go to war, an Augur would be a fool to interpret the gods’ will as otherwise.
In The Sauce of All Order Felix is on the precipice of his inauguration into the elite college of Augurs. The Inauguration takes place during a scene of decadent feasting, where shellfish, fruit and strange liquids slop across the table and are eaten from hand-made ceramics with bodily forms. The Augurs are constantly eating, their consumption, perhaps mirroring their intentions to include Felix within the collegiate body. To them, Felix is digestible and recognisable, and the economies of reading and consumption overlap. But as the decadent ceremony unfolds and as Felix digs deeper, lies, fictions and the extent of collegiate corruption are uncovered. Realising that he cannot enter the collegiate body, he finds his own disloyalty to their systems, and instead embarks on his own exauguration.
In this work, Bycroft was interested in historical precedents of constructions of truth within legal frameworks. Tampering, gossip, nepotism, false testimony and fabricating false evidence, are all explored as constitutive to “truth” and the maintenance of power. Madison Bycroft links lying to disloyalty, as a strategy to resist or circumnavigate structures of power and normative constructions of sense and “order”. Misrecognition is used to disrupt our understanding, and the figure of the mole to undermine our sense.
Working with video, sculpture, and performance, Madison Bycroft’s research extends to reading and writing and investigates how we can re-imagine “reading” (in its broadest sense) and comprehension. In Bycroft’s work, the politics of illegibility and legibility are explored through language and material, asking how ‘sense’ is framed by historical contexts, biases, and structures of power. Her film practice addresses a constellation of themes, such as unstable subjectivity, economies of understanding, fluidity, trans* studies and language.
Madison Bycroft (1987 Tarntanya, australia), lives and works in Paris, France. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia (2013) and the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016).
Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: 2025 - ADA, Rome (upcoming); Triangle-Astérides, curated by Victorine Grataloup, Marseille, FR. 2023 - sissi club, Marseille, FR. 2021 - Centrale Fies, curated by B. Boninsegna, S. Frangi, M. Chemello, Trento, IT. Recent group exhibitions include: 2025 - Languille, Grenoble, FR. 2024 - Villa Medici - Académie de France à Rome, curated by Sam Stourdzé, Caroline Courroux, IT. 2021 - Samstag Museum South Australia, Adelaide, AU. 2020 - Kunsthaus Hamburg, curated by Anna Nowak, DE. 2019 - Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, UA, Venice, IT; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR. 2018 - CAC Brétigny, curated by Céline Poulin, FR; 6th Biennale de Rennes, curated by Étienne Bernard, Céline Kopp, Rennes, Saint-Brieuc, FR. 2017 - Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide, AU. Among their residencies: Villa Medici, Rome, IT (2023-2024), La Becque, La Tour-de-Peilz, CH (2023), Ateliers de la Ville de Marseille, FR (2019), Triangle-Astérides, Marseille, FR (2017).In 2021 Bycroft has been shortlisted for the Emerige-CPGA Prize. In 2019 Bycroft has been nominated for the Prix Jeune Création and the Future Generation Art Prize.
The Sauce of All Order is a new short film commissioned by the steirischer herbst festival, in Graz, in collaboration with the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome, where Madison Bycroft was a fellow 2023-24.
The first edition of the video is part of the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR.
