Collating texts written between 2018 and 2025, the publication highlights Staff's visual and concrete poetics, experiments in typography, and obsessive linguistic tics.
Born 1987 in Bognor Regis (England), P. Staff lives and works in Los Angeles. Through installation, video, sculpture, performance and poetry, Staff's work explores the ways in which history, technology, capitalism and law transform the constitution of contemporary bodies, their tissues, their minds, and their social spheres. With a particular focus on desire, debility and dispossession, their practice mediates current biopolitical and necropolitical configurations through which bodies—particularly those belonging to marginalized communities—are disciplined and disregarded.
Distinct in its refinement, criticality, and timeliness, Staff's practice is eminently contemporaneous, both in its choice of media and materialization—from holographic film installations to sculptures made using cutting-edge scientific methods—and in its critical engagement with visible and invisible showings of violence and agency.
The exhibition space itself has increasingly become a central medium in their artistic practice. Elements such as lighting and color—along with the somatic and sensory experience of entering, moving through and exiting a space—are meticulously choreographed to create intense, sometimes unsettling, always profoundly affecting atmospheres.
