Madison Bycroft (born 1987, Australia) lives and works in Paris. Their artistic practice unfolds through sculpture, video, and performance, interweaving a profound reflection on language, intelligibility, and subjective perception.
Bycroft explores the threshold between the power of words and images and the ambiguity of their interpretation, questioning how we read and construct reality through symbols and narratives.
The frame of the video work The Sauce of All Order captures a narrative detail in which a group of eccentric characters share a banquet set in a scene of opulent decadence. The image is imbued with a deliberately excessive, almost grotesque sense of luxury that turns into a parody of power and its visual languages. In the background, a large painting depicts a golden eagle draped in a Roman toga — a universal symbol of domination and authority — at whose feet lies a book inscribed with the words “libri augurales”, the sacred texts of the augurs: priests of ancient Rome tasked with interpreting divine signs through the flight of birds, the entrails of sacrificed animals, or atmospheric phenomena. This detail explicitly evokes Imperial Rome, invoking the profound relationship between religion and power, faith and manipulation.
The augurs enjoyed a privileged status, as their voice was believed to mediate between the human and the divine realms. Yet this very proximity to the divine made them powerful political instruments, capable of influencing the emperor’s decisions and, consequently, the fate of entire communities. It is within this ambiguity—between interpretation and distortion—that Madison Bycroft’s reflection takes root.
The Sauce of All Order unfolds as a tale of the corruption (and decadence) of knowledge: a narrative in which wisdom, rather than enlightening, becomes a means of obscuring and controlling. The film follows the story of Félix, the protagonist, in his attempt to join the order of the augurs. During the banquet organized for the initiation of new members, Félix gradually uncovers the lies and deceptions that govern the system. The abundance of food and drink conceals a network of disloyalty, hypocrisy, and corrupt power. When Félix attempts to expose these mechanisms, he is cast out—his exclusion becoming a metaphor for a system that rejects truth in order to preserve its own illusion.
Through a theatrical language, Bycroft invites us to reflect not only on ancient Rome as evoked in the imagery, but also on our present moment, in which truths are continuously reinterpreted and instrumentalized.

The Sauce Of All Order, 2024
single channel digital 4k video, colour, sound
33 minutes
Commissioned by steirischer herbst ’24
Co-produced by steirischer herbst ’24 and Villa Medici – Académie de France à Rome
Courtesy of the Artist and ADA, Rome

08/10/25