P. Staff

TERMINAL LUCIDITY open now in Venice @fondazioneinbetweenartfilm So many people made this one happen, the team in Venice lead by @alessandro.rabottini @leonardobigazzi @abinoppst @2050.plus And support from @emmamuseum And I felt for the first time that I had a real team of my own , to the program the lights the animation the studio @josephrexstewartiii @stuff.josephine.makes @adamjamessinclair @tracysooming and so much music made with the brilliant @storefront_church

Sneak peek from “Terminal Lucidity” (2026), the new work by P. Staff premiering in our forthcoming group exhibition #CaniculaVenice on May 6, 2026, at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto on the occasion of @labiennale 2026 in Venice Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi , CANICULA is the 3rd and final chapter of the ‘Trilogy of Uncertainties,’ a series of exhibitions we initiated in 2022 and that has seen the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto transformed each time into a form of cinematic architecture CANICULA presents 8 new site-specific video installations commissioned from Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, Maya Watanabe The exhibition takes on the dazzling light and sweltering heat that characterise the dog days of summer as metaphors for the present day, a time saturated with excesses and distortions: extreme light and heat are thus considered to be the material and metaphorical frames within which matter, people and ideas are subject to immense pressure. CANICULA places at the centre of the narrative the individual and collective responses to a landscape consumed by technology, eroded by inequalities and polluted by propaganda, exploring the psychological, political and social dimensions of the intolerable climate in which we are immersed. The works form a choral scenario wherein the questions of control, information, science, war, the production of memory and the administration of power and truth, are all wondered about The scenography of the show, designed once again by @2050.plus , brings to life the curatorial concept through a series of spatial and sensory interventions and through the use of materials that evoke fatigue and deterioration For more info, visit Excerpt from P. Staff, Terminal Lucidity, 2026. Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, co-produced by @emmamuseum with support from the @saastamoinenfoundation , for the exhibition Canicula, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; @commonwealthandcouncil ; Fondazione In Between Art Film; @galeriesultana Typography by @lorenzomasonstudio

THIS FRIDAY SCREENING by P. Staff 📅 24 April 2026 🕞 7 p.m. (doors open 6:30 p.m.) 📌 at JSF Berlin free admission Next Friday, the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin is hosting “UMKEHR” by P. Staff as the third iteration of SCREENING. Staff will present a selection of works by Jen DeNike, Carolee Schneemann, as well as James Richards and Steve Reinke, alongside their own work, and will introduce the program in person on site. SCREENING is a series in which artists from the Julia Stoschek Collection curate a program of films and videos drawn from the collection and beyond. P. STAFF is an artist based in Los Angeles and London. Across video installation, sculpture, and poetry, their work probes the structures of power that produce and define the living and the dead. Staff’s work has been presented internationally, at locations such as Bonner Kunstverein, Germany; Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; MoCA, Los Angeles; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Images 1. P. Staff, “Skeleton”, 2025, video, 16’, colour, sound. Video still. 2. Carolee Schneemann, “Fuses”, 1964-67, 16-mm film transferred to video, 29’37”, color, no sound. Film still. 3. Jen DeNike, “The Deadman’s Float”, 2005, video, 1’, color, sound. Video still. 4. James Richards & Steve Reinke, “When We Were Monsters”, 2020, video, 21’17”, color, sound. Video still.

Oslo | P. Staff’s recent work, Penetration, is on view at Astrup Fearnley Museum (@astrupfearnleymuseet ) through May 10. Penetration debuted at David Zwirner, New York in 2025 and was shown subsequently at Kunstverein Bonn before its current presentation. Grammars of Light brings together the work of three contemporary artists—Cerith Wyn Evans, Ann Lislegaard, and P. Staff—who explore the potential of light as an artistic medium. Their immersive environments, architecturally scaled video projections, and luminous sculptures—fashioned from repurposed consumer, medical, and industrial lighting—transform the museum’s galleries and stimulate the senses. Perception is impacted in unexpected ways, and essential questions are raised about how we see the world as a thinking, feeling body.   The representation of natural light through illusion, particularly in painting, has been an enduring concern for the visual arts. Yet it was only with the advent of mass-produced artificial lighting in the early twentieth century that artists began using it as an artistic medium. These early experiments within Constructivism and the Bauhaus gave way to more intensive experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s, in which artificial light became a defining feature of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. While Evans, Lislegaard and Staff are informed by these traditions, they create associations that extend beyond the strict seriality and phenomenology of minimalism. Their works explore the expressive potential of this medium.  📸: Christian Øen

Introducing P. Staff, who will participate in CANICULA, the third and final chapter of the “Trilogy of Uncertainties,” a series of exhibitions organised by Fondazione In Between Art Film at the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto, Venice, on the occasion of La Biennale di Venezia Curated by @alessandro.rabottini and @leonardobigazzi , CANICULA will open to the public on May 6, 2026 with 8 newly video installations commissioned to Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, Janis Rafa, P. Staff, Wang Tuo, Yuyan Wang, and Maya Watanabe P. Staff (1987, United Kingdom) interrogates the ways physical bodies and their social worlds are shaped and defined by state power, industrial complexes, history and the law. Their work expands across video installation, kinetic sculpture and text, often creating dreamy yet unsettling environments where intense colours, blinding lights and ominous sounds congeal to produce sensory overload and disorientation. Drawing on queer and trans studies, affect theory and necropolitics, the artist’s work centres the body—from that of a cancer survivor, to slaughtered livestock, and even that of the visitors—as a site of mediation and conflict, where the experience of the world is viscerally felt as much as it is negotiated, flagging up both visible and invisible forms of violence and aggression in everyday life Their works have been presented internationally at institutions such as the Bonner Kunstverein; Serralves, Porto; the Whitney Biennial 2024, New York; the Kunsthalle Basel; MOCA, Los Angeles; the Biennale Arte 2022, Venice; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai; the Serpentine Gallery, London; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the New Museum, New York. They have received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Tate Liverpool/Keith Haring Foundation Artist Research Fellowship, and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Visual Arts Image credit: Portrait of P. Staff. Courtesy of the artist Visual identity: @lorenzomasonstudio #caniculavenice

celebrating with cerith / corte sconta / horns / cupid / snowcone / hard work / islands / lasers / security / angels

Pure Means (2021) my 5 minute two channel flamethrower orgy made with @traumaboner and shot by @biancaclinedp is open now as part of @juliastoschekfoundation ‘s What a Wonderful World, edited by udo kittelman, at the variety arts theatre in downtown LA

@astrupfearnleymuseet , Oslo

Minimum World now available from @bierkebooks , co published with @bonnerkunstverein Collating texts written between 2018 and 2025, Minimum World highlights Staff’s visual and concrete poetics, experiments in typography, and obsessive linguistic tics. paperback 10,6 cm x 17,7 cm 128 pages design: Björn Giesecke and Sean Yendrys

From antiquity’s memento mori and medieval Dances of Death through Vesalian anatomy, baroque ossuaries, and nineteenth-century museum specimens, depictions of the human skeleton shifted from moral emblem to scientific diagram to administrative image—conscripted into classificatory regimes that sorted bodies into purported racial types and pathological categories. After 1895, Röntgen’s X-rays reordered visibility: the skeleton shifted from memento to index, from emblem to evidence. Radiography’s promise—non-invasive truth—spread through surgery, forensics, and war medicine. The skeleton became a screen image, an index for diagnosis, surveillance, and standardization. In this new regime of visibility, Bertha Röntgen’s famous response to seeing her hand’s radiograph was telling: “I have seen my death.” With Skeleton (2025), Staff engages both the long traditions of depicting human remains and the distribution of affect around death. A bath of red light sets the scene. One by one, bones advance across the frame—skull, rib, phalanx, femur. Some index the human body without question; others slip toward pure form, unplaceable once untethered from the whole. A granular soundtrack undergirds the image: industrial, mechanistic—collaged recordings of various operations, cleanings, radio transmissions—skittering over a thudding, heavy bass. With Skeleton, aligned with their filmic practice that combines structuralist strategies with poetic propositions, Staff extends a line of inquiry into organic matter that is at once ubiquitous and excessively signified, freighted with personal, spiritual, and symbolic investments. Staff’s presentation of bones may be read as a reaction to anatomical and forensic traditions that repeatedly mobilized pelvic dimorphism and cranial metrics as clinical “proof” of a binary, essentialized sex/gender—turning averages into diagnostic certainties in order to police identity. — @viktorneumannviktorneumann

“For the prologue to their first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, artist P. Staff—renowned for an exuberant, saturating deployment of synthetic and fluorescent color that at once flattens and intensifies space—opts for a markedly different approach: one enters the exhibition through chromatic restraint, through episodes of near-white and clinical luminosity, before becoming immersed in Minimum World (2025), the artist’s latest and largest poem turned hologram. Staged within a 50-meter tunnel built for a sober yet alarming diagnosis of the present, the poem entertains no illusion of hope; it views the violence and brutality of our world as “irreversible.” Stripped of colour, lines of text flash up, stutter, vanish and return. Minimum World rotates and shatters in white alone, at times exposing its skeletal armature—the effect is radiographic, recalling X-ray’s reconfiguration of materiality and solidity, which forever overturned the received divide between the visible and the invisible.” — @viktorneumannviktorneumann

“Durchdringung names many things at once: the act of entering or forcing one’s way through, the reach of influence into tissues, spaces, or institutions; the charged moment when inside becomes outside. In medicine, it refers to radiation, fluids, or instruments traversing the body—a clinical touch that makes interiors visible; in the military, it marks a breach of defenses, the incursion of territory, the weapon’s power to pierce. In physics and optics, it measures the depth of rays or waves; in social life, it signals how laws and norms permeate everyday existence. Always, it carries the sense of something piercing, incisive, insistently perceptible. Such penetrations-optical, juridical, ballistic, clinical-do more than reveal; they recompose what a subject can be. In a culmination of the artist’s longstanding engagement with visible and invisible registers of violence and agency, Durchdringung evokes the forces that enter, infiltrate, and transform: beams through tissue, armies through borders, laws through bodies, vision through opacity— each crossing leaving traces of power and exposure.” — @viktorneumannviktorneumann Opening tonight @bonnerkunstverein