"I was looking at the ways art and sport interact and overlap," Siobhan Wootten said, after installing The Tao of Avery in the Unipol cafe.
The three works target late International Olympic Committee president Avery Brundage (1887-1975).
"For 20 years, he was head of the Olympics and a racist and a bigot, who was also an Asian art collector. I was really interested by that."
Brundage was head of the IOC from 1952 to 1972 and a passionate collector of Asian art, whose collection later formed the basis for the San Francisco Asian Art Museum.
However, he was also an apologist for Nazi Germany and a racist, who dropped out of the decathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics when he was well behind Native American Jim Thorpe, Ms Wootten said.
The 1.8m by 2.4m works juxtapose images from the 1912 Stockholm, 1936 Berlin and 1968 Mexico Olympic Games with Asian art works collected by Brundage.
"I was dismayed that neither of these institutions felt compelled to reveal too much about their benefactor's identity, so I have chosen to do that in my work," Ms Wootten said.
"They are celebrated images of art that he collected and I wanted to bring them out with more hidden images that he didn't want people to know about."
The installation is part of the Blue Oyster Art Project Space and University of Otago Art on Campus initiative, to promote contemporary art around the university.
The Tao of Avery installation will be on display at Unipol until the end of the Olympic Games.
