Artist in Focus Series: In Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer
VIEW EVENT DETAILSEvening discussion
Drinks Reception 6:30pm;
Discussion 7:00pm;
Close 8:00pm
Paul Pfeiffer is renowned for utilizing sophisticated digital technologies to dissect the role mass media plays in shaping contemporary consciousness and seeding his works with religious references. He has long investigated the relationship between film, video science and sports, racial politics and spectacles. His video works on professional sports events extract the athletes who are normally the stars of the game and shifts audience’s focus to the spectators, sports equipment or simply the absence. The artist employs techniques in his practice to focus his attention on a single detail, so that a larger image becomes almost unrecognizable. Pfeiffer likes the combination of a title that conjures up the history of the figure study evolution and simultaneously a suggestion of a larger epic occurrence, with dramatic ending or shifting. Together with Cosmin Costinas and Joselina Cruz, this evening discussion will allow Pfeiffer to explore the multiple ways in which he has manipulated projection and installation strategies to display telling characteristic of his works, creating immersive experiences in museum and gallery environments.
Paul Pfeiffer is an artist working in the field of video, photography, installation art and sculpture since the late nineties and is well-known and celebrated for his highly sophisticated use of digital technologies and new media, probing the way these technologies at once shape and alter our daily visual experience. Digitally manipulating or erasing elements from iconic images, many of them taken from sports events or Hollywood films, Pfeiffer adopts today’s frenetic visual language in order to explore our culture’s obsession with spectacle and uncover its hidden cost. Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2010), the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin (2012), Paula Cooper Gallery, NY (2012), Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2013) and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum. In 2011 he was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany. He is currently working on a project for Galerie Perrotin Hong Kong (2015), and the Museo Madre, Naples (2016).
Cosmin Costinas is the Director of Para Site, Hong Kong. He was co-curator of the 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014-2015), Curator of BAK, Utrecht (2008-2011), co-curator of the 1st Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg (2010) and Editor of documenta 12 Magazines (2005–2007). At Para Site, Costinas oversaw the institution's relocation to a new home in 2015 and curated: Sheela Gowda (2015); the conference “Is the Living Body the Last Thing Left Alive? The new performance turn, its histories and its institutions” (with Ana Janevski, 2014); Great Crescent: Art and Agitation in the 1960s—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (with Doryun Chong and Lesley Ma, 2013-2015); A Journal of the Plague Year (with Inti Guerrero, 2013-2015); Taiping Tianguo, A History of Possible Encounters: Ai Weiwei, Frog King Kwok, Tehching Hsieh, and Martin Wong in New York (with Doryun Chong,; 2012-2014), a.o. At BAK, he curated In the middle of things. Olga Chernysheva (2011); I, the Undersigned. Rabih Mroue (2010-2011); Expo Zero. Boris Charmatz (2010); 1st Former West Congress (with Maria Hlavajova, 2009), a.o.
Joselina Cruz is the Director and Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila. She studied art history at the University of the Philippines, and received an M.A. in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London. Cruz has worked as a curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila (2001-04) and the Singapore Art Museum (2004–07). She was a curator for the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008 and one of the networking curators for the 13th Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Cruz was curator-in-charge of the Tàpies retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum (2005), co-curated All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, Singapore Art Museum (2006), curated You Are Not a Tourist for Curating Lab, Singapore (part of the Singapore Art Show 2007), Creative Index: An Exhibition in Manila (2010) for the 10th Regional Anniversary of the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship program, and Paul Pfeiffer: Vitruvian Figure, MCAD, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, Manila (2015). She also writes essays, reviews, criticism, and art commentary.
Supported by:
Event Details
Asia Society Hong Kong Center, 9 Justice Drive, Admiralty