La Fin Du Monde, 2021
IAI’s La Fin Du Monde staged a single-painting exhibition in a public toilet, hijacking Courbet’s L’Origine du monde to interrogate masculinity and institutional pomp. The oil painting—a meticulous replica of Courbet’s erotic masterpiece, but substituting the vulva with the artist’s own exposed buttocks—hung in a stall, flanked by gallery-style lighting and an official didactic label. Titled La Fin Du Monde (The End of the World), the work inverted Courbet’s celebration of feminine generative power into a darkly comic meditation on male futility.
The intervention weaponized bathroom-stall intimacy to critique art-world grandiosity. By staging a “solo show” in a space synonymous with bodily function and anonymity, IAI collapsed distinctions between sacred white cubes and sites of abjection. Visitors navigated urinals and hand dryers to view the work, its faux-prestige clashing with the bathroom’s utilitarian grit. The project riffed on art history’s obsession with genital iconography while lampooning Sydney’s commercial gallery theatrics—where transgression gets branded and mounted.
La Fin Du Monde asked: If the female body symbolizes creation, then the male posterior heralds collapse. The work refused reverence, using scatological humor to skewer art’s commodification of identity and the absurdity of “elevating” anything in a room that smells of bleach.
IAI Institute 