Grand Opening, 2022
IAI’s Grand Opening staged a mock institutional launch outside Sydney’s Reserve Bank, hijacking corporate ritual to probe art’s ties to capital. Wearing suits and holding champagne flutes, participants performed a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Martin Place—Sydney’s financial hub—mirroring the self-mythologizing theatrics of gallery openings.
The action merged institutional critique with absurdist intervention, occupying the tension between art’s aspirational rhetoric and its reality as a luxury commodity. By transplanting gallery-opening tropes to banking turf, IAI exposed the shared language of cultural and financial power: exclusivity, branded disruption, and the performance of prestige. The work pulled from histories of tactical media and fictive institutions, but sharpened its focus on Sydney’s art economy—a system increasingly shaped by venture philanthropy and corporate patronage.
Champagne toasts clashed with commuter routines; business attire merged art-world elitism with corporate conformity. Grand Opening questioned what it means to “launch” art in a city where galleries court mining sponsors and museums monetize dissent. The project reframed institutional critique as a public gambit, confronting art’s uneasy dance with neoliberal capital.
IAI Institute 