Power Toilets

Power Toilets questions public access to power structures. Consisting of an exact replica of the interior of a toilet found within an iconic political or corporate site of power, the work confronts the architecture of power by taking an everyday site of waste – the toilet – and reimagining it as a public domain. Power Toilets attempts to redistribute power by opening the world’s most inaccessible places to the public. In doing so, the work invites its users to question the relationship between original and copy, exclusivity and inclusivity, and, ultimately, the infrastructures of power and its every day manifestations.

In order to create each work, the interior of the toilet is secretly accessed and photographed by SUPERFLEX or by a third party and then replicated in painstaking detail. The copy-toilet is then installed in a publicly accessible location, in contrast to its original context.

This ongoing series includes exact replicas of toilets from global sites of power such as the United Nations Security Council headquarters in New York, the JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York, the Council of the European Union in Brussels, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bonn,  and the Executive Board of the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Power Toilets is designed in close collaboration with NEZU AYMO architects.