Rooted in the medium of performance, film and sculpture, Mads Bycroft’s work moves across the spectral and the post-natural, the human and animal, the intelligible and the opaque. Led by a grammar of transformation and ambiguity, Bycroft’s work inhabits a world of illegibility — one populated by marginal, queer, unpredictable creatures that resist definition. Reclaiming the figure of the monster — retrieved from the Latin word “monstrum”, meaning an extraordinary event or a divine sign of good or ill — Bycroft positions monstrosity not as deviance, but as potential.

Between birds, gargoyles and (non)recognisable beings, Bycroft’s figures appear hybrid and unfixed. Birds are particularly central to their work: known to be sensitive to environmental and meteorological changes, they are also historically linked to prophecy and close to the gods. The film The Sauce of All Order (2024), made during a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome, operates between myth and fantasy. Unfolding during a sumptuous banquet, the film celebrates the inauguration of character Felix Culpa into the circle of ancient Roman augurs and priests who interpret natural phenomena brought by the flight of birds.

Bycroft’s visual language reflects the poetics of opacity: embracing incoherence and fragmentation as tactics of resistance. It invites viewers to dwell within contradic-tion as a form of knowledge production, challenging nor-mative structures of sense.

Mads Bycroft (1987, Tarntanya, adelaide, australia; lives and works in Marseille) blends the queer, the opaque and the divine, exploring the different forms of reading and writing, expression and refusal. They ask how “sense” is framed by historical contexts, biases and power struc-tures, and navigate it through the mechanisms of subjectivity and language.

Photos: Michal Schorro