In celebration of the opening of Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, join us for a talk between exhibiting artist Paul Pfeiffer, artist and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and writer and theoretician Iyko Day. Together they discuss the full breadth of Pfeiffer’s practice, considering the shifting terrain of image-making, and its changing meanings and impact in contemporary society.
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About the Speakers

Paul Pfeiffer is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer’s objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness. Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017–18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others. The first large-scale retrospective of his work in the US opens at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in November 2023.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race & Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is also a faculty member and former co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism and recently co-edited the special issue “Palestine After Analogy” with Nasser Abourahme for Critical Ethnic Studies journal.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (British/Ugandan) is an artist, writer and editor based in the United States. Recent exhibitions include Scene at Eastman (George Eastman Museum, 2024-25); recent publications include “ECHO—LOCATION” (e-flux Journal 153, April 2025) and INDEX 2025 (Roma Publications #485).

About the Exhibition

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom presents 25 years of work from artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI; lives in New York, NY), whose practice interrogates ideas of spectacle and mass culture. By repurposing the tools and systems of media production—including editing, staging, and outsourcing—Pfeiffer recontextualizes global celebrities such as pop stars, film actors, and athletes to reveal relationships between audiences and icons. As the artist puts it, “who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?”

Whether through televised broadcasts of sporting events, editorial photographs of cultural icons, or the ecstasy of a soccer stadium, Pfeiffer interrogates the consumption of images and culture. For Pfeiffer, the basketball court, the boxing ring, and the stadium not only serve as platforms for grand spectacles but as sites where the body politic—of a nation, of a community, of society—is imagined, defined, and contested.

Spanning two and a half decades of work, the exhibition features works by Pfeiffer in the MCA Collection, including Fragments of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon) (1999) and Study for Morning After the Deluge (2001), as well as Self-Portrait as a Fountain (2000), which is part of the recent D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift. This exhibition is the MCA’s fourth that centrally features Pfeiffer’s work, following his career-defining solo show Paul Pfeiffer in 2003, MCA Screen: Paul Pfeiffer in 2018, and Fragments of a Crucifixion in 2019. The accompanying catalogue for this exhibition includes an interview from Fragments of a Crucifixion between Pfeiffer and former MCA Marjorie Susan Curatorial Fellow Chanon Kenji Praepipatmangkol, and features contributions from University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Tom Gunning, artist Julie Mehretu, and historian Lawrence Chua.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and curated by Clara Kim, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Paula Kroll, Curatorial Assistant. The MCA presentation is curated by Bana Kattan, former Pamela Alper Associate Curator, with Iris Colburn, Curatorial Associate.

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Tags: Chicago, Iyko Day, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Near North Side, Paul Pfeiffer, Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa