P. Staff: Possessive

David Zwirner is pleased to present Possessive, an exhibition of work by the London- and Los Angeles–based artist P. Staff (b. 1987) on view at the gallery’s East 69th Street location in New York. Staff’s expansive practice—which includes sculpture, video, installation, and writing—explores how language, desire, and institutions define and regulate embodied experience. Responding subtly to the space’s architectural cues, the artist’s installation—which includes a central video work projected across the gallery’s three stories, and a new series of sculptures—simulates the sensation of a body as it is infiltrated and surveilled. This will be Staff’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Solo exhibitions include P. Staff: On Venus, curated by Claude Adjil, at the Serpentine Galleries, London, in 2019, and P. Staff: In Ekstase, curated by Elena Filipovic, at Kunsthalle Basel in 2023. Staff’s work was also featured in Even Better Than the Real Thing—the 2024 Whitney Biennial curated by Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, with Min Sun Jeon and Beatriz Cifuentes—and The Milk of Dreams, the 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani. Bonner Kunstverein, Germany, will open a major solo exhibition of the artist’s work on October 11, and their work will be featured in the 2025 Taipei Biennial Whispers on the Horizon, opening November 1.