Event overview
The Department of Art Public Talks Programme Autumn 2019 welcomes artist Patrick Staff.
Through a frequently interdisciplinary body of work, Patrick Staff (b. 1987, United Kingdom) interrogates notions of discipline, dissent, labour and the queer body. In video, installation, performance and text, Staff’s work cites the ways in which history, technology, capitalism and the law have fundamentally transformed the social constitution of our bodies today, with a particular focus on gender, debility and biopolitics.
Staff’s most recent work, The Prince of Homburg (2019), reflects on the dissident figure of German playwright Heinrich Von Kleist’s eponymous play. Exploring exhaustion, sickness and fraught spaces where queer desire manifests, Staff’s reinterpretation of the play sets the stage for a series of temporal and spatial interventions in the original dramatic narrative through moving image, installation, found and personal objects, and framed works. In turn, 2017’s Weed Killer expands Catherine Lord’s 2004 memoir The Summer of her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation through a series of re-contextualizations and re-performances. In these works and others, Staff invokes queerness and trans-life praxis to consider the bio-political governance of bodies, countervailing performative acts of self making and undoing as means to challenge patriarchal reproductive and gendered norms.
Patrick Staff is an artist based in London, UK and Los Angeles, USA. In 2009 Staff completed a BA in Fine Art Practice and Critical Contemporary Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and subsequently studied Modern Dance at The Place, London in 2011. They were a part of the influential, alternative education project the LUX Associate Artist Programme led by artist-curator Ian White in 2011. Staff’s work has been exhibited, screened and performed internationally, including solo shows at the Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017) amongst others. They have been part of a number of significant group shows such as The Body Electric, Walker Art Center (2019); Made in LA, Hammer Museum (2018); Trigger, New Museum (2017); and the British Art Show 8, touring venues (2016). Staff received the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists in 2015. Their work is held in public and private collections internationally.
Image credit: Patrick Staff, Weed Killer (2017)
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 13 Nov 2019 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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