Bianca Censori Melds Flesh and Furniture in Her Surreal Performance Art Debut

Since 2023, Australian architect Bianca Censori has become a global sensation for her body, slaying sheer fits alongside her famous rapper husband. The enigmatic icon has barely spoken out, however. This week, she caused the usual tabloid stir upon touching down in Seoul. But, few knew that Censori had arrived to debut BIO POP, her first-ever work of performance art. The 14-minute stunt, staged both yesterday and today, certainly made a statement, even though Censori never uttered a word.

BIO POP was beautiful, but boring as sin. You can catch footage of the performance on Censori’s website now, after technical difficulties upended her livestream yesterday. On film, Censori spends the first nine-and-a-half minutes puttering around a clean, chic kitchen island in a sexy red catsuit, her long dark hair giving espionage. The soundtrack is stirring—a cinematic orchestral arrangement that occasionally evokes a movie montage of a good girl enjoying a perfect morning. The set, designed by Censori, proves equally stunning, elegantly divided in half, though viewers aren’t meant to notice that until she finishes pretending to bake a cake.

Finally, at 10-and-a-half minutes in, Censori places her cake on a wheeled cart. The music changes with a startling scream that soon sounds like a buzzsaw. The second half of the stage, still hidden behind a curtain, illuminates. As Censori pushes her cherry-hued confection that direction, her strut reads antiseptic, hardly theatrical. It’s slow, like the luxurious funk that starts bumping as the ample white curtain mechanically pulls back, revealing a living room full of furniture brought to life by rigid contortionists resembling a naked Censori. She places the cake on a table, sits gently down on one doppelgänger’s butt, and doesn’t move a bit, even as the curtain starts closing a minute later.

So, what did we just watch? “BIO POP stages the body inside the language of the domestic,” a statement on Censori’s site reads. “The cake, baked in performance and carried to the table, is not nourishment but an offering. It embodies the tension of the kitchen as origin, labor, and ritual: a gesture of domestic service reframed as spectacle.”

BIO POP marks just the first in a series of seven performances that Censori has planned for the next seven years. Next year will host CONFESSIONAL (THE WITNESS), followed by another installment titled BIANCA IS MY DOLL BABY (THE IDOL). “The seven-year arc is about lived time,” Censori told me over email. “It moves through pop culture, objects, reliquaries, and domestic space as markers of collective experience. It isn’t a closed narrative—it’s a way of tracking how life accumulates meaning.” Through this lens, it makes sense that the series starts in the home, where pretty much everyone’s existence begins.

Apparently, this series took shape in Censori’s mind some time during 2020—the same year she became Head of Architect at Yeezy, fresh on the heels of finishing her Master of Architecture degree at the University of Melbourne, according to LinkedIn. Legend has it that Censori originally wanted to be a sculptor, until her aunt introduced her to architecture. From then on, Censori embraced the practice as an extension of fine art—a sort of sculpture people could live in and activate.

Rumblings about her latest endeavor bubbled up on June 10, when XXL noticed that Censori had registered a business named Bianca Inc. in California. The press puzzled over what the project could be—some guessed clothes, some guessed furniture, and some guessed jewelry, based on Censori’s experience operating a buzzy bauble line called Nylons from 2013 through 2017.

Earlier this month, Censori debuted a white heart-shaped pill reading “BIO POP” with a sign up sheet on her site, only igniting further questions. Then, yesterday’s attempted livestream went online alongside a capsule collection of new silver jewelry, styled after scalpels, speculums, and even electrodes—echoing the medical overtones of Censori’s BIO POP furniture.

The pieces onstage, lined with warm cream shearling, mimic physical therapy tables, crutches, and more—while counterintuitively warping users into BDSM-like poses. The jewelry is for sale, priced at about $1,650 to $3,900 a pop, as are the performance’s chairs (price upon request, for now). One has to imagine BIO POP was a demo, that the girls don’t come with the seats. “Objects will continue to appear alongside the performances,” Censori said. “They function as extensions of the work, not merchandise—for the collective to participate in a consumable way.”

Censori’s interest in furniture as prosthetics echoes her previous fascination with Future Primitivist architecture—a movement wherein buildings aim to cooperate with nature, rather than resisting it. She and her colleague Tanil Raif discussed the matter with HYPEBEAST in 2022. That same year, they released a table structured around a nude female that looked like robot sculptor Hajime Sorayama’s take on Pop artist Allen Jones’s iconic Table (1969). “Bianca [is] interested in collapsing distinctions between body, object, and environment,” Censori told me from the perspective of one of her lookalikes. “The boundary is artificial. The work treats all of them as continuous systems.”

Now that is an interesting addition to the rising conversations that contemporary installation artists like Panteha Abareshi, Agnes Questionmark, and Jo Shane are staging with the medical establishment in light of our surgery-prone era. When I asked whether Censori was inspired by any particular artists while formulating this series, I learned that she “draws from architecture, performance, and sculpture, but her primary interest is collective experience—what draws people in, what resonates, and why. The work is shaped more by structures of attention.”

That part recalls performance artist Vita Kari’s maxim of using virality as a medium—which, I guess, all of society is doing in its own way these days. Censori, however, uniquely understands silence’s power to spark spectacle, even if only for a few minutes. I’d like to think sex positions aren’t enough to shock us anymore, but look how worked up we get every time she wears tights as pants. Hopefully Censori will have something more to say next year.