By Joachim Aagaard Friis
At first the exhibition unfolds almost quietly. An opening leads from the bright foyer of the Bonner Kunstverein into a cooler, darker, more restrained atmosphere. But this experience is very brief. After just a few seconds, it becomes apparent that the fans mounted on the walls throughout the long and narrow space do not just rotate rapidly, they also emit fragments of poetry through hectic bursts of strobe lights. From here on out unfolds an intense immersive experience.
P. Staff’s first Germany-based exhibition Durchdringung is structured across four rooms and stages a sequence of encounters between bodies and the technologies that seek to observe, measure, or intervene in them. Moving through the exhibition’s labyrinthine layout, the viewer gradually becomes aware that the works are less about representation than about the infrastructures of visibility itself – how images, instruments, and environments penetrate the body and reorganize how it is understood, making the viewers themselves part of this apparatus.
Eschatological beginnings
The first room feels almost clinical. Colour is absent, and the environment is reduced to spatial disorientation produced by the strobe lights and the symmetrically positioned fans. Fragments of language and symbols flash briefly across the surfaces of the spinning fans before disappearing again, creating a rhythm that resists sustained reading (Minimum World, 2025). One of Staff’s poems is projected word by word onto the fans. Some of it reads like this:
There is GUN FIRE! EXTREME HUNGER
You are GIVEN TAKEN
You are TOUCHED by IT
And without reprise
Without RELIEF
WITH NO GO BACK
You are OOOPPPEEENNN
The last word, “open”, flickers and starts a stroboscopic firework. At times the imagery evokes the aesthetic logic of radiographic imaging, which will be a theme in the entire exhibition: forms, in this case, words, appear stripped to their internal structure, resembling skeletal outlines. The effect is unsettling because of the many repetitions, flickering lights, and, of course, the poem’s dramatic and eschatological undertones. Vision appears as something heavily engineered, shaped by the technical systems that produce intelligibility. Standing in the space for a while, the brightness begins to feel almost investigative and claustrophobic, as if the room itself were examining the viewer with blitzes in darkness.
Bones and indices
The second installation shifts both visually and atmospherically. The room is saturated with red light while a sequence of projected bones is seemingly painted onto a screen one by one – skull, rib, finger, femur, isolated from any surrounding body (Skeleton, 2025). A granular soundtrack composed of industrial noises and fragmented transmissions accompanies the images, producing a low mechanical hum that eerily fills the space.
The skeletal imagery evokes the long history of bones as scientific evidence – of gender among other things. In anatomical study and forensic practice, skeletons have served as tools for classification and diagnosis that promise objective insight into the human body. However, in this installation that certainty becomes questionable. Detached from the body that once held them together, the bones begin to oscillate between specimen and symbol. The skeleton dissolves into fragments, each bone functioning as its own index. Instead of being part of a coherent whole, the bones are each separated from the body that was once the object of diagnosis.
I notice my gaze becoming uncertain – what am I witnessing here? What at first appears as an expressionistic painting coming into the making, changes to a clear anatomical diagram, and then slowly dissolves back into painterly abstraction. The work frames the skeleton no longer as simply the structure beneath the skin – “skin on bone” as Staff’s poem puts it – but also as a reminder of how the body is being repeatedly transformed into data, index, proof, placed into binary categories and formed into a controllable subject.
Penetrating atmospheres
If the previous works operate primarily through images and sound, the third room introduces a more bodily form of intervention. Visitors enter a corridor that bends sharply, limiting visibility and compressing movement. The lighting is dimly orange, and a faint haze fills the passage – as if the end of the world had already passed and I had entered some kind of after-world.
Only through the exhibition text does it become clear that the atmosphere itself is part of the work. Hormonal Fog (2025), originally developed by P. Staff in collaboration with Candice Lin, releases vaporized compounds associated with testosterone suppression into the air. The intervention is subtle, but the knowledge of entering an air that slightly limits testosterone is strangely reassuring in a world dominated by aggressive displays of power. Furthermore, the possibility that the artwork might interact with the viewer’s endocrine system, however minimally, introduces a shift from observation to participation that has remained under the surface up to this point.
The corridor of the third room feels like an environment to move through and absorb, including the ominous text fragments on the walls, literally signaling the end of the world, especially for marginal communities (Minimum World (pages), 2025). In the context of ongoing debates around hormone regulation, gender identity, and the political governance of bodies, the hormonal gesture carries a particular urgency. It suggests that the boundaries between art, biology, and political infrastructure are more porous than they might appear. Again, in this particular moment, it is an unexpectedly comforting thought, even though the entire world of P. Staff seems so bleak.
The non-binary beam
The final room introduces a radical spatial shift; it is vast and the ceiling stretches to the full height of the Bonner Kunstverein (in the other rooms there have been built walls and radically lowered ceilings specifically for the exhibition). In the center, a huge projection shows an individual standing in the dark with a bare torso (Penetration, 2025). They stand still while a thin green laser beam touches their stomach. The beam remains quite fixed for the duration of the video, creating a moment that is both simple and full of tension: a line of light entering, a body enclosing, a scene of potential exposure.
The visual language immediately evokes multiple technological contexts. Laser light belongs equally to medical imaging, surgical precision, and the targeting optics of military systems. In each of these frameworks, the beam functions as a tool designed to locate, measure, and penetrate surfaces – to enter the body’s interior and expose it as information. Yet the performer’s stillness introduces ambiguity into this gesture.
As the exhibition text mentions, the body seems to contain the beam rather than being penetrated by it. The contact point becomes a suspended negotiation between exposure and enclosure that dissolves simple passive/active binaries. The light touches the skin, but the body remains quite still while absorbing the light, reframing the act of entry in a soft way. Over time the distinction between observer and observed begins to blur. An uncanny soundtrack fills the dark space, which remains empty save for the video projection. I am watching the performer, but the intensity of the beam suggests other invisible apparatuses of vision already at work – one that exposes the body and one that remains partly resistant to the gaze, or to even absorb it.
The politics of exposure
Across its four rooms, the exhibition traces in subtle and unnerving ways how bodies become visible and classifiable through a range of technological and institutional means. The exhibition also delivers a broader reflection on the systems that govern visibility today, especially in the United States where Staff lives and works. Medical imaging, surveillance technologies, and military optics all appear as interconnected mechanisms designed to reveal interiors and transform them into actionable knowledge. These technics are combined with references to a current political climate fraught with dehumanizing agendas putting marginalized groups at unprecedented risk.
Yet Staff avoids reducing these concerns to simple critique. Instead, the exhibition unfolds through a series of immersive and sensory encounters that make the dynamics of the apparatus bodily tangible for the viewer. The installation remains with me as a heightened awareness of the act of seeing in a world saturated with technologies that promise ever-greater transparency and access. Durchdringung successfully approaches the politics of vision and its categorization in a register far removed from the exhausted language of images – already worn out by constant over-use – and toward sensory and ambivalent experience.
Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn
P. Staff: Durchdringung