MADISON BYCROFT (AU)
Residency period: January-February and August 2023
Madison Bycroft (born 1987) lives and works in Marseille. Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia and the MFA programme at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016). Working with video, sculpture and performance, Bycroft’s current interests extend into forms of reading and writing, expression and refusal. 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 goal-oriented towards accomplishment, but as a relationship that hovers and creates space: opaque, never arriving, ungrounded and floating. They explore a methodology of disorientation and a practice of pleasure that is not goal-oriented and instead fractured, wandering, abstracted and planktonic.
Bycroft’s works have been shown at Kunsthaus Hamburg, Palais de Tokyo, Museum Tinguely, MAAT Lisbon, the Seoul Museum of Art, ICA Singapore, Transmediale Berlin, the 22nd Design and Architecture Triennale in Milan among many others. They have also featured in several projects associated with TBA21 as well as in the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize.
During their residency they will research, develop, write and potentially shoot elements of a short new film, Waterlogue, which aims to explore standardised metrics, and, as a ripple effect, how these metrics govern our speech and expressions. Taking inspiration from the dynamics of water (waves, tides, eddies, flows, etc.), Bycroft will write a script that breaks with methodologies of evenly metered, legible, units in favour of something less solid, more unstable, non-binary and opaque. The research will develop around key figures (i.e. Kamau Braithwaite, Astrida Neimanis, Edouard Glissant) and experiment with the application of fluid dynamics to moving images.
Madison Bycroft, photo Thomas McCammon