Bianca Censori is most known to the pop culture zeitgeist for her provocative clothing choices (a pillow being hugged at midsection is but one example), and as the muse and wife of the artist formerly known as Kanye West. But Censori is also an architect and the former architectural designer of Yeezy. Today she makes her debut as an artist with a take on flexible furniture.
Performed in Seoul, Censori’s exhibition BIO POP featured the designer, donned in a maroon latex bodysuit, carrying a cake into a living room full of furniture composed of contortionists. Constrained within and woven around the furniture, they were clad in nude bodysuits and made to look like her body doubles. Censori designed the furniture herself, using bone-colored upholstery and brushed metal frames to recall padded medical crutches. Pieces include a chair that uses the contortionist’s arched back as a back rest and butt to support a seat; a two-tier coffee table that rests upon the performer’s backbend; a chandelier from which another double hangs down; and side table with legs protruding out of the top.
Of course, Censori is not the first to implement humans into furniture. The work most explicitly recalls Anna Uddenberg’s 2023 exhibition, Continental Breakfast, which incorporated performers in pencil skirts splayed within machinated sculptures, mimicking airplane and hotel furnishings. In 2019, an exhibition at Stockholm Furniture Fair, Hurry Up Before We Collapse, also used humans as functional objects. It featured design students from Linnaeus University as furniture that visitors were invited to sit and interact with as a way to highlight the corrosive structures behind consumption.
For Censori, human-made furniture is less about object consumption so much as it is about the consumption of personhood and domestic spaces. BIO POP is a “self-portrait in constraint,” according to the Australian architect’s website. It continues, “Positions learned in private are worn in public. It is the first reliquary, holding rituals and heirlooms, inscribing both body and spirit with its codes. The domestic, turned uncanny, becomes the womb of the system—the site where intimacy, confinement, and identity are first inscribed.”
The furniture itself is not “passive support” but “an apparatus that moulds the body, turning comfort into confinement and domesticity into architecture. The doubles inside the furniture become extensions of the design, collapsing the distinction between object, body, and idol.”
The exhibition is planned as a series of seven installments with the next two performances—“CONFESSIONAL (THE WITNESS)” and “BIANCA IS MY DOLL BABY (THE IDOL)”—slated for 2026. Other are scheduled to roll out over the years with last in the series planned for 2032. While more information about upcoming performances was not shared, furniture promises to be “the first in a cycle that will expand into reliquaries, confessions, sacrifices, and rebirths.”
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