P. Staff: Durchdringung

Bonner Kunstverein is proud to present Durchdringung, the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany by artist, filmmaker, and poet P. Staff, on view October 11, 2025–February 1, 2026. The exhibition presents newly commissioned works within a specially designed architectural intervention, alongside a public program and publication. It is conceived as a choreography of dense spatial atmospheres in which body politics are addressed through sensory overload, latently menacing interventions, and gestures of eroticism.  

For the past decade, Staff’s practice has explored ideas that merge the body—often marginalised, debilitated, or queered—with the architecture of disciplining institutions, somatically and psychically perverting our integration with the built environment. Across video installation, sculpture, and poetry, their work probes the constitutive and disciplinary structures that produce and define the living and the dead.

Staff’s exhibition takes as its departure point a total intervention into the spaces of Bonner Kunstverein itself: a newly constructed series of rooms and corridors are each consumed by an exuberant, saturating deployment of synthetic and fluorescent colour that at once flattens and intensifies, choreographing unnerving environments and affects. Strobing light reminiscent of MRI scans and X-rays, a disassembled skeleton and the searching glare of a laser, explore and delineate life and death under surveillance or siege.

In a culmination of the artist’s longstanding engagement with visible and invisible registers of violence and agency, Durchdringung—penetration—evokes the forces that enter, infiltrate, and transform: beams through tissue, armies through borders, laws through bodies, vision through opacity—each crossing leaving traces of power and exposure. On the occasion of the exhibition, Bonner Kunstverein and Bierke Verlag have co-published the first collection of Staff’s poetry entitled Minimum World. Collating texts written between 2018 and 2025, the publication, designed by Björn Giesecke and Sean Yendrys, highlights Staff’s visual and concrete poetics, experiments in typography and obsessive linguistic tics. The thirteen poems included in Minimum World read like “sweat-drenched fever dreams, or the medicated, horny stupor of sexting from one’s own sickbed.” (1)

Previous solo presentations of Staff’s work have been mounted at Kunsthalle Basel; Serpentine Galleries, London; MOCA, Los Angeles; and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Their work has been included in significant group exhibitions and biennales such as the 59^th Venice Biennale, 2022 and the Whitney Biennial, 2024. Their work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Collections, London, Arts Council England Collection, LUMA Foundation, FRAC Bretagne, and Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin.

The show marks the initial exhibition under the tenure of Bonner Kunstverein’s new director Viktor Neumann.

The exhibition is generously supported by Stadt Bonn/Kulturamt, Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunst der Sparkasse in Bonn, Henry Moore Foundation, Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung and Kemmler Foundation.

(1) Blood of the Beasts: Matthew Lax on P. Staff at Kunsthalle Basel, Texte zur Kunst, September 2023