At Frieze London this week, even the bathroom will be a place to see art. Gray Wielebinski’s new site-specific Production (2026) will transform the fair’s public toilets into an intimate olfactory environment, where scent, bodily function, privacy, desire, and surveillance will converge.
Rather than disappearing into the functional infrastructure of the bathroom, Production announces itself as an artwork: Custom urinal cakes and toilet-rim blocks infused with two scents are housed in sculptural cages, with security tags attached. They are strange, brightly colored, and scented. One is almost lipstick-red, while the other is black. Their texture is also different from typical urinal cakes. “They almost look like cosmetics, or like an art material,” he told ARTnews in an interview ahead of the work’s installation at the Regent’s Park.
The last time Frieze commissioned an artist to make work about its bathrooms was a decade ago, with Julie Verhoeven’s The Toilet Attendant… Now Wash Your Hands (2016), featuring the artist as the attendant in a piece of performance art. Like with Production, that work with its commentary on the ethics of labor in the art world, had a political dimension to it.
Made in collaboration with perfumier Dean’s Bottom, each of Production’s individual parts carries Wielebinski’s name and a security tag, and though they are not for sale, they are, technically, editioned. “It’s bringing up questions of value too,” he said, connecting it to the work’s overall setting, an art fair.
The objects’ sculptural cages add another layer to the work, connecting them to ideas of protection and exclusion. For Wielebinski, the bathroom is a particularly charged site, where the politics of gendered space have been used to police their use by transgender and gender non-conforming people.
Across the UK, new official guidance that came into force this past August states that single-sex spaces open to the public, including toilets and changing rooms in places like restaurants, gyms, hospital wards, and refuges, should be organized based on biological sex. The guidance, published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), adds that trans people should use either gender-neutral facilities or the ones that match their biological sex. It comes after the UK Supreme Court ruled, in April 2025, that “sex” in equality law means “biological sex” rather than the gender someone identifies as. Trans-rights activists have strongly opposed the code’s implementation, with Trans+ Solidarity Alliance calling the gudiance “unworkable.”
“I think it’s something that I’m obviously very—I don’t want to say ‘drawn to’ but it impacts my life on a daily basis,” he said. “The bathroom holds a very fraught and also sacred and fun and ambivalent place in my world, in my life, in my psyche.”
Wielebinski first became interested in using scent for his 2023 installation Exhibition for the British department store Selfridges. “It started extremely organically,” Wielebinski said, describing his current olfactory obsession as a means of creating atmosphere and a way of translating between different mediums.
The scent of Production is also intentionally familiar, especially for any artists attending Frieze. Wielebinski describes them as “a take on the industrial smelling urinal cake that already exists that we’re used to smelling in the bathroom coinciding with a more conceptual scent based off of the scents of my studio.”
Wielebinski said he wasn’t quite sure what emotion Production will elicit of those who interact with it, though he expects a “wide range of feelings,” from attraction to disgust, curiosity to ambivalence. His intention isn’t one of provocation but to provide a collective experience to an otherwise private moment, or “a hushed secret thing that then also becomes communal in whatever way that might be,” he said, adding that he hopes it become the topic of conversations, jokes, and even criticism.
“Whenever you put work out in the world, it’s out of your hands, but I also think that’s, for me, when my work comes alive, when an audience interacts with it,” he said, noting that he wants to “draw people’s attention to all these things about what a bathroom can mean, and what a body can mean.”