20.3.2023 Lecture

Madison Bycroft: Caution Against Snatching

Madison Bycroft (they/them) Born in 1987, Tarntanya (Adelaide, Australia), lives and works in Marseille, France.

Bycroft is a graduate from the University of South Australia (2013), and the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016). Working with video, sculpture and performance, Madison Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, refusal and excess. 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.

Bycroft is interested in how we might re-imagine “reading” (in its expanded sense) and understanding, not as an economy – goal oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and makes space: opaque, never arriving, ungrounded and floating. Here, floating is explored as a methodology of disorientation and a practice of pleasure that is not goal oriented and instead fractured, wandering, abstracted and planktonic.

Recent presentations include: BTW, It’s Brimming at Maxxi, L’Aquila, Italy, Carried Away: Beyond A Rooted Condition with TBA Academy in Cordoba, Spain, BIOPIC, at the Samstag Museum of Art, South Australia, uncommitted barnacle, at centrale fies (dro, Italy,2021) and MAAT museum, Lisbon, Portugal, For Refusal – Transmediale, (Berlin, 2021) Making Kin, at Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg, Summer 2020), Feedback Loops, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, (Naarm, Melbourne, Australia 2020) Futur, Ancien, Fugitif, Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2019), Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center, (Kiev and Venice, 2019); À Cris Ouverts – 6e Biennale de Rennes, (Rennes, Saint-Brieuc, 2018), and Desk Set, CAC Brétigny (Paris, 2018).

2022-2023