P. Staff’s Interventions Reflect a Sick Society

Museums are a good place for taking the social temperature and, by most indications, society is sick. Institutions inevitably reflect inequities in the wider world. To that end, P. Staff’s ‘In Ekstase’, on view at Kunsthalle Basel, invokes state and corporate power as both literal and figurative ills. Subtle interventions in the gallery architecture, from its ceilings to its floors, contribute to the exhibition’s oppressive atmosphere of violence.

The piss-yellow light that flows out of the entrance is the first of several details that trigger involuntary bodily responses. As your eyes adjust to the haze, daylight pouring through the windows will appear unnaturally green. Strung just below the ceiling, an electrified net, normally used to control livestock, hums threateningly (Afferent Nerves, all works 2023). If Michael Asher’s 1970s excavations of gallery spaces focused attention on the walls of the white cube in order to expose their ideological contingencies, Staff’s work performs a similar operation by directing our gaze where we rarely look – up – and, in turn, invoking the ways institutional architecture can oppress those seeking to shatter its metaphorical ceilings.

The exhibition’s most unsettling work, Bloodheads (Kunsthalle Basel), takes centre stage in the following gallery, though its discreet presence in the previous room and outside the show entrance is likely to have gone unnoticed. Staff has replaced certain window and door handles, socket covers and parquet floor tiles at Kunsthalle Basel with replicas cast from animal blood. Hardened using an albumen-based biopolymer – developed in collaboration with the artist Basse Stittgen – the fixtures have dulled to a dung brown. Animal blood is often used in lab experiments by the many pharmaceutical companies headquartered in Basel, a link that recalls one of the Kunsthalle’s prime funding sources as well as the low-wage art workers who shed their ‘blood’ – or sweat equity – to make museums run.

The show’s latter half indulges in less subtle theatricality to mixed effect. In a darkened room, spotlights illuminate a set of steel intaglio etchings that hang on the walls (HHS-687). Each reproduces the titular document, a consent form used by the US Department of Health and Human Services for ‘voluntary’ sterilization procedures. For decades, governments in Western industrialized nations, including Switzerland, coerced minorities, particularly women of colour and the mentally ill (a category that included transgender people), to sign such forms in exchange for housing or other welfare benefits – an unofficial eugenics policy. The subject feels both urgent and personal for Staff, who is transgender, particularly in light of the anti-trans laws recently passed in the US, where they are based. As a medium, intaglio, achieved using corrosive acid, also recalls certain archaic sterilization methods. Strangely, though, the parts of the documents redacted by the artist don’t cover up any information that isn’t publicly available – in contrast to Jenny Holzer’s 2007 screen prints of classified US government documents, which they closely resemble. Rather, HHS-687 serves to aestheticize these bureaucratic forms as art, while the dramatic lighting undercuts the sterility and soullessness of their subject matter.

A similar dissonance is palpable in La Nuit Américaine (American Night), the exhibition’s climax. A filmic montage of daytime scenes shot around Los Angeles is submerged beneath a crepuscular blue filter, lending the footage the appearance of having been filmed at night. Bubbling fountains, beer spilling from a broken bottle and foamy ocean tides invoke leaky bodies dispelling blood or urine; strobe sequences, meanwhile, make the work difficult to bear for anyone with light sensitivity. La Nuit Américaine feels just as ominous as Staff’s other works, but it’s less clear to what end; the only obvious authority here is the artist behind the camera subjecting us to extended retinal burn. This also means that, like it or not, ‘In Ekstase’ will stay with you long after you leave.

P. Staff’s ‘In Erkstase’ at Kunsthalle Basel is on view until 10 September

_{Main image: P. Staff, Afferent Nerves, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Kunsthalle Basel; photograph: Philipp Hänger / Kunsthalle Basel}