Artist: P. Staff
Exhibition title: Impact Play
Curated by: Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo)
Venue: Fundació Joan Miró – Espai 13, Barcelona, Spain
Date: April 28 – July 9, 2023
Photography: Roberto Ruiz / images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Fundació Joan Miró
Note: Exhibition’s booklet is available here
P. Staff explores in Impact Play the sensorial parameters associated with pleasure and violence.
P. Staff’s proposal for Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai 13 presents a three-dimensional video installation based on investigating structural violence and the possibilities of a trans existence.
The project suggests reading as a channel of violence, as well as its potential for resistance with regard to the intimate and the abject. Their audiovisual piece creates a dialogue between the formal strategies of experimental cinema in the 1960s and the techniques of image diagnosis.
Fixations per Minute is the Espai 13 exhibition series presented by the Fundació Joan Miró for the 2023 season in collaboration with the Fundación Banco Sabadell. Curated by Yaby, a curatorial team comprising Beatriz Ortega Botas (Oviedo, 1990) and Alberto Vallejo (Zamora, 1990), the project examines the concept of reading and its relationship with current artistic practices through the works of a selection of artists from the local and international scene.
Barcelona, 27 April 2023. Flashes of colour, words, hand-painted frames and brief shots of asses being spanked set the beat for Impact Play. The video installation presented by P. Staff at Espai 13 returns to several formal explorations of structural cinema, an experimental movement from the 1960s and 1970s that rejected the narrativity and illusionism of conventional filmmaking to focus on the material substratum of the medium per se. What takes centre stage is therefore cinema’s capacity to generate a sensory experience through duration, light and form.
In Impact Play, P. Staff establishes a parallel between some of the visual resources of these films and clinical techniques for visualising the body – magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound, X-rays. According to the curatorial team: ‘These are optically enhanced images that further medicalise the body while at the same time revealing contrasts in human texture, density and temperature that reveal the somatic as a site of integral variation.’ Burns and stains of colour associated with film as a physical medium therefore appear overlaid on human skin to underscore the permeability of bodies. These visual effects are interrupted by representations of strange physiognomies that spectators can only guess at. Completing all of this is a broken poem naming various parts of the body and forms of bodily contact that speeds up until becoming impossible to read.
The video’s reproduction by holographic fans carries this physicality even further by projecting the images in the same three-dimensional space where the public experiences them. The project’s curators highlight how ‘the non-mediated effects that Impact Play has on bodies reflect the direct intervention that defines its own process of creation: narration and illusion as a means of discursive persuasion are replaced by crudely manipulating the material and corporeal qualities of the filmic.’
P. Staff (Bognor Regis, UK, 1987). A visual artist, performer and poet, P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles and London. They completed their studies at Goldsmiths’ College (London, 2009) and formed part of the LUX Associate Artists Programme (London, 2011).
Their work has been exhibited and performed worldwide, with solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (upcoming), Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2022, 2018); LUMA, Arles (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); and Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015), among others. They have recently participated in group exhibitions at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022); 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021); Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021); 47 Canal, New York (2021); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018), and New Museum, New York (2017).
They are recipients of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2019) and Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Artists (2015), and they have participated in residences at FD13, Minneapolis (2018); LUX, London (2014); The Showroom, London (2014); Fogo Island Arts, Canada (2012), and Banff Centre, Canada (2010). Staff’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LUMA Arles; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf.
Fixations per Minute is the Espai 13 exhibition series presented by the Fundació Joan Miró for the 2023 season in collaboration with the Fundación Banco Sabadell. Curated by Yaby, a curatorial team comprising Beatriz Ortega Botas (Oviedo, 1990) and Alberto Vallejo (Zamora, 1990), the project examines the concept of reading and its relationship with current artistic practices through the works of a selection of artists from the local and international scene. The exhibition proposals by Claudia Pagès, P. Staff, Jota Mombaça and Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes, and Kandis Williams use a variety of visual media to complicate some of the technical and rhetorical mechanisms of reading in order to reveal its political consequences.
The title of the project is a reference to the formula used to calculate reading speed. A fixation occurs when your eye fixates on a word: the lower the number of fixations per minute, the higher the speed at which you process text. These fixations are the points of intimate and physiological contact through which a text enters the body. The term also points to other attributes of language relevant to this season of exhibitions, such as its ability to consolidate meanings or to impose itself just as an obsession does.
