When Sandy Warre-Hole’s Gause De Flim (Triptych of the Improbable) was unveiled at the 2024 Hobart Biennale, it ignited an inferno of critical fascination and public fury. But no one—least of all Warre-Hole —could have predicted the bizarre form of protest that would lead to its removal from public view less than two days later: a daily ritual in which demonstrators gathered in the gallery atrium to sing off-key lullabies at the portrait until the museum closed. The result was not only disruption, but dissonance—conceptual and literal—forcing curators to take the work off display “for the mental well-being of staff and visitors.”¹
As performance, protest, and provocation blurred into each other, the central question grew only louder, and more ludicrous: Is this the most controversial artwork of the century so far?
The Work: Triptych or Tripwire?
Warre-Hole’s triptych is a digital media experience. Gause De Flim—depicted variously as a shirtless rapper flanked by flaming violins, a weeping organist at a gothic console, and a levitating footballer in embroidered C of E clerical football kit—seems less a subject than a sigil.² Behind the image is a palimpsest of visual puns and theological paraphernalia: transfigured sportswear, deconstructed Gothic tracery, and sampled phrases in French, Latin, and whatever they speak in the Maldives. Critics have called it everything from “sacrilegious grandeur” to “a sonic migraine in visual form.”³
Yet, if Warre-Hole’s goal was to expose the mechanics of postmodern identity through the idolization of celebrity polymaths, she also unwittingly summoned a new kind of iconoclasm—one built not on fire or censure, but cacophony.
The Subject: Gause De Flim, Fact or Fabrication?
Gause De Flim—rapper and organist,—might be the most curiously documented public figure of the 2020s. His genre-defying music, described as “baroque drill-hop with penitential overtones,” has reached viral status, yet his biographical details remain suspiciously fluid.⁴ His appearance at the 2025 Coupe de Bordeaux halftime show, where he recited a freestyle rap over Olivier Latry’s Salve Regina, only deepened suspicions: was he real, an AI-enhanced cypher, or another Sport/Art project gone too far?
One persistent theory claims that Gause is an elaborate collaboration between Warre-Hole and a media collective in Marseille. Whether or not he exists, he has become the spiritual nucleus of Warre-Hole’s project—a post-everything martyr of symbol overload.
The Protest: Dissonance as Dissent
By early 2025, protests outside the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Winchester had morphed from ideological outrage into something far stranger. A rotating choir of protestors—some self-identified as “Guardians of Aesthetic Coherence”—began singing lullabies at the artwork each gallery day, purposefully off-key.⁵ These performances began as simple acts of derision but evolved into a kind of meta-performance in their own right. Critics were divided: was this the birth of an anti-aesthetic movement, or the death rattle of a confused cultural moment?
Regardless, the effect was tangible. Visitor numbers dropped. Staff reported headaches, anxiety, and what one docent called “existential tinnitus.” By May 2025, the museum announced that Gause De Flim (Triptych of the Improbable) would be “removed indefinitely, pending recontextualization.”⁶
Intersections of Identity, Iconography, and Insufferability
Warre-Hole’s work does not only critique our contemporary obsession with hybrid identities—it embodies it to the point of rupture. In choosing to depict a single figure as athlete, musician, and mystic, W-H collapses the taxonomies of identity until they implode. Yet in doing so, he may have exposed not just the complexity of the modern subject, but the exhaustion of meaning itself. The audience, bombarded by layers of sacred and profane, classical and digital, responded with absurdity: they sang nonsense lullabies back at the artist.
This is the mirror Warre-Hole holds up. Not a clear reflection, but a foggy self-portrait of a century spinning faster than its symbols can stabilize.
Conclusion: Controversy by Design—or Accident?
Controversy has long been a metric for artistic relevance. But Warre-Hole’s Gause De Flim is a rare instance in which protest, audience fatigue, and institutional discomfort converged to banish a work not for obscenity or offense—but for unbearable ambiguity.
Whether it is the most controversial artwork of the 21st century remains to be seen. But it is certainly among the few to be sung into silence.
Footnotes
¹ Musée des Civilisations internal statement, May 2025, reported in Le Figaro Culture, 18 May 2025.
² Warre-Hole, S. (2024). Artist’s Notes on the Triptych of the Improbable, Hobart Biennale Catalogue.
³ Palmer, R. (2024). “Liturgy, Leather, and Lanyards: The Collapse of Aesthetic Syntax in Warre-Hole’s Gause.” Frieze, Winter 2024 Issue.
⁴ Spotify Meta-Genres Initiative, 2025. See: https://www.spotify.com/meta-genres/gause-de-flim
⁵ Duras, J. (2025). “The Discord Choir: How Protest Became Performance at the Musée.” Libération, April 2025.
⁶ Statement by curator Élodie Monnet, in “Triptych Withdrawn Amid Noise Complaints and ‘Emotional Disruption’.” The Art Rag, May 19, 2025.
