Christophe Muylaert

This artwork presents a grotesque and ironic tableau that parodies the logic of racial and evolutionary classification. In the background, a didactic illustration of human evolution shows a progression from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens, echoing the pseudo-scientific diagrams once used to justify hierarchies of race and civilization.

In the foreground, three artificial nipples of varying skin tones are displayed on numbered pedestals—evoking both a natural history museum and a beauty contest. The nipple marked “1” is pale and centrally placed, while the darker nipples take positions “2” and “3”, subtly implying a ridiculous and disturbing hierarchy of desirability or advancement.

By linking skin color and bodily ornamentation to evolutionary superiority, the work exposes the absurdity—and danger—of essentialist, racialized thinking. At the same time, it plays with pataphysical logic (after Alfred Jarry), embracing a world where the exception becomes rule, and where the nonsensical undermines all claims to objectivity.