P. Staff

David Zwirner is pleased to present Possessive, an exhibition of work by the London- and Los Angeles–based artist P. Staff. Responding subtly to the space's architectural cues, Staff's installation—which includes a central video work projected across the gallery's three stories, and a new series of sculptures—simulates the sensation of a body as it is infiltrated and surveilled. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in New York.

Staff's expansive practice—which includes sculpture, video installation, and writing—explores how language, desire, and institutions define and regulate embodied experience. Considering the biopolitical—the state's regulation of living populations—and the necropolitical—how life and death are entwined with structures of domination—the artist's work encapsulates, in the words of writer Maxi Wallenhorst, a "poetic of metabolic disorder" that interrogates how marginalized subjects come into being in the precarious and violent contexts of our contemporary moment. Employing varied cinematographic and photographic techniques, poetry and language, and materials such as congealed blood and electric nets used to fence in animals, Staff expresses the affective conditions of dissociation and dysphoria while revealing the ungovernable nature of bodies.