Title:
Bio Pop (The Origin), Bianca Censori
Author:
Stephanie Berlangieri
Date:
16.07.26

Kim Kardashian in Balenciaga at the 2021 Met Gala. Photo: Theo Wargo for Vogue.

Managed Appearances: On the Reframing of Bianca Censori as Performance Artist

In a Vanity Fair feature earlier this year, Bianca Censori, in her first and only in-depth interview to date, proclaimed, “Demanding me to speak … is a form of control in itself.”1 An architectural designer and since 2022, Kanye ‘Ye’ West’s lawfully wedded (and publicly mute) wife, the interview read as an attempt by Censori to reframe her public image: to quell speculation about her notorious silence, assert her autonomy over her body and position herself as a Serious Artist in the wake of her first formally staged performance. While we’ve all been speculating about the terms under which Censori disrobes for the cameras, those terms remain unclear, shaped by the ambiguous dynamics of authorship and control that surround her relationship with Ye.

In order to make a fair assessment, it might help to cast our minds back to some of Censori’s ill-famed public appearances over the past few years, where a progression emerges; one that begins in fashion but becomes increasingly legible as performance. It started with the full-body morph suits, face coverings and masks, echoing the Maison Margiela designs of Ye’s Yeezus era and the Balenciaga-defined aesthetic of Donda. These appearances prompted claims that she was little more than a Kim copycat, reproducing the Kardashian’s own uptake of her then-husband’s turn toward anonymity, most memorably in her fully obscured, head-to-toe ensemble at the 2021 Met Gala.

Bianca Censori and Ye West in Florence in 2023. Photo: paparazzi image. Source: X.

Bianca Censori and Ye West at the Grammy Awards in 2025. Photo: paparazzi image. Source: Yahoo.

At times, this impulse towards concealment tipped into something faintly narrative, as in Censori’s pillow look, in which she appeared clothed in little more than a pair of tights and a single cushion held to her chest. Head bowed, gaze averted, the image carried a strange vulnerability—almost childlike, a protective gesture—less covering-up than exposure, as if emerging before the paparazzi in the aftermath of something private.

Elsewhere, Censori was photographed walking barefoot through cities like Los Angeles and Paris, cultivating a kind of raw, Kreuzberg-y, anti-luxury aesthetic. In one widely circulated set of paparazzi images, Kanye West appeared to expose himself while Censori was positioned between his legs on a Venetian water taxi, an incident that reportedly led to both being banned by a local boat company. At the 2025 Grammy Awards, perhaps the culmination of this phase, Censori removed a black fur coat to appear essentially naked for the cameras, while Ye stood beside her dressed in black, stoic. Yet even here, she was in fact wearing a dress, albeit one made from a sheer, mesh-like fabric more typically used to secure revealing garments in place.

These appearances unfolded against the backdrop of Ye’s well-documented history of styling his partners, several of whom have retrospectively described these dynamics as controlling. In reference to Censori, Amber Rose remarked, “‘He did the same thing to me and Kim [Kardashian].” On Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kim recalled the extent to which she deferred to his judgment, later admitting, “I got to a point where I would ask him for advice for everything … Even now I’m having panic attacks, like, what do I wear?” Julia Fox, reflecting on her brief relationship with Ye, described feeling like a “show monkey” and his “little puppet.”

Bianca Censori, The Speculum Cuff 1, 2025. Source: Bianca Censori.

Censori, however, offers a different account. “Me and my husband would work on my outfits together,” she explains. “It was like a collaboration … If you were married to Gianni Versace, wouldn’t he give you a dress or something?” Ye’s own framing has been explicit, posting on X in 2025, “I HAVE DOMINION OVER MY WIFE.” The line between collaboration and the top-down artist–muse dynamic remains blurred, but Censori is clearly intent on asserting her own creative agency within it.

Returning to the interview, here she recasts her indecent public appearances as what she calls a “nudity project.” What unfolded in the tabloids as a progression from concealment to exposure is now framed as deliberate and staged. Censori’s need to labour the point is telling; the declaration of artistic intent begins to drain much of the mystique and with it, the appeal of her image. With these earlier exploits now framed as part of an elaborate, ongoing artistic project, we are primed to decipher her first officially art-world-sanctioned performance, Bio Pop (The Origin) (2025).

The fourteen-minute work took place across two days (11 and 12 December 2025) before an invitation-only audience of around three hundred upper-crust guests, though most viewers encountered it later on YouTube, myself included, presented as the first in a multipart series set to unfold over the next seven years, the forthcoming chapters are titled Confessional (The Witness) (2026); BIANCA IS MY BABY DOLL (The Idol) (2026); STARBABY (Worship) (2027); BONE OF MY BONE (The Sacrifice) (2029); GENESIS (The Rebirth) (2031) and BUBBLE (The Ascension) (2032), their subtitles taking on a decidedly liturgical register. On her website, the performance series sits alongside a line of silver jewellery modelled on medical instruments—speculum cuffs, cannula bracelets and electrode necklaces—recalling the custom-forged metal tools in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988), albeit far less grotesque, suggesting less a discrete artwork than a continuous system in which performance, product and image circulate together.

Bianca Censori, Bio Pop (Origin), 2025, promotional image. Photo: Noah Dillon. Source: Wallpaper.

The performance sees Bianca Censori poised behind a sleek stainless steel kitchen countertop, donning a blood-red latex bodysuit (again, perhaps a reference to the red surgical gowns worn by the twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers), a black wig and pumps. Against the backdrop of a cinematic score composed by Ye, she moves in slow, drawn-out, mechanical gestures, baking a cake: pouring, whisking, measuring. At one moment she brings her leg up onto the counter in a kind of pigeon pose, displaying her flexibility, with a suggestion of positions beyond the strictly yogic. She lowers herself to her knees to place the bowl of dark, whisked liquid into an oven, only to open another beside it and produce a perfectly round chocolate cake. She then places it (a glistening Adriano Zumbo-like confection) on a bar cart and wheels it across the set.

There is a sudden screeching sound, which shifts into something like a slow, stylised groove that might play over the credits of a Tarantino sequence, as a curtain to the left of the scene opens to reveal a domestic set-up: a dining table, two chairs, a coffee table and a chandelier inhabited by contorted figures. These are, in fact, masked body doubles—real flesh-and-blood contortionists wearing nude latex suits and occupying the furniture. Constructed from metal tubing reminiscent of crutches, joined by rubberised grips and capped ends and layered with shearling across the armrests and frame, the objects read as much like showroom pieces as elements of the set. Censori wheels the cake, which matches her outfit, to the table and sits in a rigid, upright position at the very edge of the chair. The curtain slowly rolls back to conceal her and the lights dim, leaving only a saucepan illuminated on the cooktop.

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, video still.

Allen Jones, Hatstand, Table and Chair, 1969. Source: Christies.

Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, 1971, movie still.

Consider, for a moment, the many on-the-nose artistic references in the work. The legacy of second-wave feminist performance art is clearly invoked, where Martha Rosler parodies the perfect housewife in Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), appropriating her kitchen implements for unproductive or violent purposes, Censori does not invert the script in any particularly shrewd or insurrectionary way. Instead, the work presents her as an object of desire, her gestures deadened by the routine of repetition. The armatures inhabited by the contortionists recall Rebecca Horn’s ‘body extensions,’ wearable prosthetics that extend, restrict and direct the body, calling attention to its constructedness and the ways in which it is forced to relate to the world. But even more obviously, the furniture borrows from Allen Jones’ Hatstand, Table and Chair (1969), a group of erotic sculptures that provoked outrage at the time, particularly among feminists who saw them as objectifying women’s bodies and perhaps more readily recognised today through the pop-cultural afterlife of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). Jones was contacted by Kubrick to produce similar works for the film and although he declined, Kubrick drew on the idea in the Korova Milk Bar scene. Censori’s is less a reworking of these references than their regurgitation, a high-production, first-year performance project, over-resourced but underdeveloped. If Censori had presented this work at the VCA, she wouldn’t have survived the crit.

Installation view, Anna Uddenberg, Premium Economy, 2024, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim. Photo: Jens Gerber.

Geumhyung Jeong, Homemade RC Toy, 2019, performance documentation, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel. Photo: Evelyn Bencicova.

Where a contemporary artist like Anna Uddenberg contorts bodies to the point of extreme discomfort to expose the pressures of optimisation under contemporary conditions of hypercapitalism, Censori’s figures are constrained by a form of domestic enclosure, though this commentary now feels distinctly passé. Another artist working in similar terrain, Geumhyung Jeong, stages performances with machinic parts that test the limits of the subject–object relation through intimate and often unsettling encounters between the human body and things, probing how agency, desire and control might shift as we move towards increasingly technologised forms of embodiment. In both Uddenberg and Jeong’s work, there is a sustained engagement with what agency and femininity mean in the present. Censori, by contrast, does not advance the discourse. Her talent, it seems, ends at image-making rather than critical inquiry.

Censori remains within a vaguely second-wave feminist conceptual frame, adopting its (sanitised) visual hallmarks without its critical force. Her artist statement reinforces this position, somewhat puzzlingly conflating domesticity with revolution, “Domesticity is the mother of all revolutions, because all others trace back to it.” The statement gestures toward a familiar feminist proposition, that the domestic sphere is foundational to the production of subjects and social roles but then extends this into a claim for revolt. Of the sculptures, she writes, “Each piece is not passive support but an apparatus that moulds the body, turning comfort into confinement and domestic space into architecture.” Here, the domestic is recast as a system of constraint, shaping the body through its structures, a position that sits uneasily alongside its proposed revolutionary potential. More difficult to parse is her assertion that “the cake, baked in performance and carried to the table, is not nourishment but offering.” The language gestures toward ritual, sacrifice, even transformation, but without clarifying what, exactly, is being transformed.

Bianca Censori, Bio Pop (Origin), 2025, performance documentation. Source: Korea Joong Ang Daily.

What emerges, then, is a carefully managed reframing of those earlier public appearances into a coherent artistic trajectory, in which the tensions that made them compelling, their exposure within the heightened contingencies of public space, the tabloid speculation around authorship and control, are smoothed out through the stabilising frameworks of artistic intent and institutional presentation. The street, it seems, remains her most potent stage, precisely because it cannot be so easily managed—where appearance still carries its charge.

  1. Anna Peele, ‘Bianca Censori, Uncensored: For the First Time, Kanye West’s Wife Is Speaking for Herself,’ Vanity Fair, 6 February 2026,

    ⬈

Stephanie Berlangieri is a curator, researcher and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She is Curator – Research at Monash University Museum of Art. Previously, she held curatorial positions at Carriageworks, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Biennale of Sydney on Gadigal Country/Sydney. She has written for Art Monthly Australasia, ArtAsiaPacific, Artist Profile and Art and Australia.

Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.