The Lies of the Weatherman
A solo exhibition by Madison Bycroft
June 27 - November 16, 2025; public opening on Thursday, June 26, from 5 to 10 pm
Panorama, Friche la Belle de Mai
⮕ Read the exhibition’s guide by clicking here
An exhibition conceived and produced by Triangle-Astérides, co-produced by the cooperative La Friche la Belle de Mai.
With the support of Villa Medici and the Fondation des Artistes.
Partners: Actoral, steirischer herbst ‘25
Madison Bycroft’s solo exhibition, The Lies of the Weatherman , is built around their film The Sauce of All Order (2024), created during their residency at the Villa Medici in Rome and presented here in an installation version enriched with four videos, seven paintings and two series of sculptures (2025).
At once a coming-of-age, a musical, and a fantasy film, The Sauce of All Order follows the (literal) inauguration of Felix Culpa, who is to join the circle of augurs—priests of ancient Rome who interpreted natural phenomena, especially the behavior of birds, as omens.
The film is projected within a large mound of earth, a human-scale molehill. The exhibition is structured around two animal figures—mole and bird—that form a meaningful opposition. On one side, aerial creatures associated with elevation (particularly of vision) and used in divination; on the other, a subterranean beast whose name evokes duplicity and concealment. In Madison Bycroft’s work, contradiction is ever-present and unresolved, tangled within a lush formal universe that obscures meaning as it constantly eludes us. Their sculptures, for instance, are simultaneously birdhouses and bird-scarers—designed to attract and repel at once.
In both the film and the series of paintings, there are seven augurial birds, each corresponding to a character: the vulture (Viscera), the woodpecker (Audite), the peacock (Petronius—a reference to the presumed author of the Satyricon, a diffuse inspiration for The Sauce of All Order), the raven (Ignatius), the eagle (Magus), and finally the owl (Somnium) and the chicken (Avis). These last two are treated separately from the rest of the bird paintings: near the entrance of the molehill stands the owl, a solitary bird and bad omen. The chicken, on the other side of the mound, bears a halo and a scroll-like phylactery inscribed—in mirror image—with the phrase: “I’m always lying.”
Through lies and divination, the film ultimately explores the fraught possibility of accessing the truth of beings and things through language. Weather forecasts—and, more broadly, reality itself—always exceed the interpretive frameworks we use to predict or explain them: organic and unruly, reality seeps beyond the frame, beyond norms, like the exquisite sauce at the augurs’ banquet, which Felix Culpa longs to taste— as do we, “even a little bit.”
Curator: Victorine Grataloup
Production: Camille Ramanana Rahary, Florence Gosset
Scenographic design, technical coordination, and installation: Benoit Fremaux, John Girard, Matthieu Girard, Thomas Meysson, Caroline Selig, Vincent Sojic
Front-of-house ticketing team: Elisa Cardheilac, David Soriano, Mia Suau
Public reception and gallery attendants: Aude Bourhis, Tatiana Calderо́n Ellis, Elsa Gasnault, Rachid Hogas, Agathe Mirafiore, Yoen Murray, Romane Philippe, Souvenir Sitty Bahiya, Annabelle Verhaeghe
Artist’s assistants: Elisa Chaveneau, Nour Zarrouk ; newspaper in collaboration with Zoé Brunet-Jailly
Exhibition’s assistants: Clara Juan, Léa Battesti
The artist would like to thank: Diletta Bellotti, Robyn Bycroft, Elisa Chaveneau, Dina Mimi, Robin Rutenberg, Dre Spisto, Kristine Kjeldsen, Jess Saxby, Joel White, Nour Zarrouk, ArtEZ Ceramic Departement, Triangle-Astérides’ team, Sissi, The WNBA, and their dog Ash for feedback and support
“Madison Bycroft (they/them), born in 1987 in Tarntanya (adelaide, australia), lives and works in Paris, France and is the tutor of the group FKA Critical Practices at Artez, in Arnhem.
Bycroft is a graduate of the University of South Australia (2013), the MFA program at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (2016), and was a fellow at the Villa Medici in Rome (2023).
Working with video, sculpture, and performance, Madison 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 makes space - opaque, errant, fractured, and floating.”