in production

Director Dylan Levers

Director of Photography Consuelo Althouse

P. Staff, In Ekstase, Kunsthalle Basel, 2023

The exhibition, In Ekstase, by British artist P. Staff (*1987), incorporates all new works in video, sculpture, and installation. As their largest solo show to date, it draws on persistent concerns of the artist, such as the myriad processes by which the living—especially marginalized communities—are disciplined in a society defined by capitalism and its brutality. Through a weaving of trans poetics, mysticism, and necropolitics, Staff constructs an exhibition at once atmospheric and haunting. To visit it will be to enter a universe. To leave it will be to be transformed by the artist’s urgent reflection on that essential question: how can we define what it is to live, truly live, in a world on fire?

Artist P. Staff

Director of Photography Consuelo Althouse

PATRICK STAFF MADE IN L.A. 2018 HAMMER MUSEUM

In film installations, performances, and new-media works, Patrick Staff cites the various ways in which the queer body is embodied, interpreted, and regulated. For Made in L.A. 2018, Staff created Bathing, a video exploring themes of contamination, cleanliness, and debility through performance and dance. Bathing is an adaptation of a performance Staff developed that features a solo performer moving in and out of a shallow basin of water. Between the performer’s movements, the video intersperses images of oil, spit, fluid landscapes, and U.S. border patrol, with flashes of a dog lost to a blissful state of chaos.

The work combines references to modern dance, including dance made specifically for the camera, with Staff’s research into the classical figure of the bather, chemical effects, drunken revelry, and the spiritello figures that commonly adorn European fountains. The performer’s continuous actions and gestures eventually lead to overexertion of the body. A fluid cross- contamination between substance, performer, and image occurs, bringing to mind the ways in which bodies absorb and release chemicals, hormones, and other agents—a means of survival for some and are potentially lethal for others.

The video embraces feelings of anxiety induced by stagnant water and its pollution, while expressing ambivalence about the supposed opposition between inebriation and good health, suggesting that states of intoxication may be compared to a queer mode of being. However, while offering the toxic as a possible source of liberation from conservative notions of well-being and capacity, Bathing also asks us to consider the inherent privilege in celebrating states of disorder and from whom those privileges are commonly withheld.

Artist P. Staff

Director of Photography Consuelo Althouse