25 Years of Paul Pfeiffer — In Conversation with the Artist at His Guggenheim Bilbao Survey

Working across video, photography, sculpture, and sound, Paul Pfeiffer’s multidisciplinary practice interrogates themes of spectacle, belonging, and difference. Born in Honolulu and based in New York, the artist spent much of his childhood in the Philippines—affording him a broader and transnational perspective on American identity. For over 25 years, he has utilised early digital editing tools like Photoshop and Quark XPress to manipulate footage from sporting events, concerts, and films, dissecting the psychological and perceptual dynamics of shared experiences.

From the hyperreality of photo retouching and digital erasure to the endless repetition of video loops, his mastery of postproduction allows him to magnify the surreal aspects of contemporary existence, where bodies become sites of saturated observation, and violence-as-entertainment flirts with nationalism, religion, and ancient myth. Open now and on view until 16 March 2025, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, the artist’s largest survey exhibition in Europe. Hours ahead of the show’s opening, Something Curated’s Keshav Anand sat down with Pfeiffer to learn more.

Keshav Anand: How does your experience as a spectator inform the way that you construct works about spectatorship?

Paul Pfeiffer: Generally, I think I come into situations as a spectator, as something like an outsider. Sometimes I think of it as being akin to an anthropologist, ethnographer, or even a scientist in a way. I’m conscious that what I’m driven to explore, in some ways, are scenes of mediated, mass rituals. Whether explicitly religious or not, there’s a production and propagation of belief systems.

Or, collective experiences—forms that are meant to create a kind of collective cohesion or collective thought or perception of things. So, I’m looking at that situation, while at the same time not being a believer myself. That’s where I feel it’s important to immediately say I’m not primarily there to enact a critique in the traditional sense because I don’t see myself as separate from the believer.

In some ways, the difference is only one of, I guess, an interest in the production rather than just the immersion in or enactment of the ritual itself. It’s really about the production of the ritual. And I have to say, I grew up in a family of musicians who performed specifically in the context of a Protestant church in the Philippines—an American Protestant church.

So, maybe growing up around the production of music meant to create a kind of emotional envelope for theological messages prepared me or made me attuned to focusing on the production of ritual rather than just the ritual itself.

KA: I see—that makes a lot of sense. What interests you in the architecture of spaces conceived for collective focus?

PP: At some point, maybe by chance, I found myself focusing on classical architecture. I became curious about the repetition of patterns within it. Not coming from an architecture background, this wasn’t part of my formal education—it was just a curiosity.

Why are there only seven orders of columns? Why repeat Ionic, Doric, and Corinthian patterns over and over from antiquity to the present? I started reading books on classical architecture, and what I found was unexpected. Classical architecture, at its core, was tied to the education of a kind of nobility. Behind the columns and buildings was a set of proportions considered essential, applying to not just architecture but music, painting—every art form.

They were political and spiritual as well. The same proportions could be found on every level—from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic. Aligning one’s aesthetic productions, like a building, with these proportions was believed to align them with a cosmological order.

What seemed like simple repetition was actually an alignment across individual, social, political, religious, and cosmological dimensions. To me, this was an amazing rabbit hole. It sparked the idea of playing with two-dimensional or three-dimensional models of these relationships—something that seems simple on the surface but contains the DNA of cosmic relationships.

KA: How does it feel seeing works spanning 25 years of your career in the same space at the same time?

PP: It’s a privilege and a pleasure. It affords incredible perspective. I’m not just seeing works from 25 years; I’m editing them. A lot gets edited out to create a precise sequence—highlighting some relationships and decongesting others. The process of choreographing a sequence of 25 years allowed me to rethink the relationship between my personal experimentation and generational shifts, framing it in relation to the evolution of image-making technologies over that time.

KA: Has your perspective on your role as an artist shifted over these 25 years?

PP: Certain key intuitions have proven true. For example, I’ve always felt certain images are interesting not just for their familiarity, but because that familiarity can act as a container for multiple perspectives. Images that resonate across multiple meanings simultaneously fascinate me. Early on, I followed this intuition—that some images might resonate broadly if they resonated strongly with me. Rather than starting with, “I want to say this, and I need the right image,” it was more like, “Here’s an image that resonates in many ways.”

KA: Interesting. You mentioned in the press conference this morning that you appreciate when people laugh at your work. What role does humour play in your practice?

PP: Humour, like crying or any emotional response, is a bridge between perception and expression. What triggers laughter—like what triggers tears—is a thought process. It’s often the coexistence of multiple, contradictory meanings. Laughter is a non-verbal expression of recognition. I love how sensory phenomena, operating in relation to memory, can bypass language and produce bodily effects. In my series Caryatid, where I remove one boxer from a match, the emphasis shifts to the impact on the remaining body. Your response becomes somatic—felt physically, bypassing language.

KA: Speaking of your Caryatid series, how do you approach selecting the devices you use to display your films, like the transparent monitors?

PP: It varies. In one piece from the show, I used a chrome monitor to echo the reflective surface of the Stanley Cup trophy featured in the work. But more broadly, I’m drawn to CRT monitors—those bulky, rounded monitors. These are antiques now. They’re obsolete, which makes them compelling to me. Their obsolescence allows for reinvention outside the system they once belonged to. To me, these pieces are like time capsules—extractions from the constant flow of production and consumption of images.

KA: Does nostalgia have anything to do with the use of these older technologies?

PP: Nostalgia has a contained emotional state—a longing for the past. My interest in the “DNA” of the past is more about producing a sense of Otherness, detached from predefined emotional meanings. It’s more ambiguous, open-ended, and unstable than nostalgia.

KA: Could you recommend a book that’s inspiring you?

PP: Sure. One is Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti. It’s a fascinating study of crowd psychology and its relation to the individual. Another is Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism by Rudolf Wittkower, which frames classical architecture’s underlying ideas in simple terms. Both have influenced my thinking recently.



Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is open now and on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao until 16 March 2025.



Feature image: Paul Pfeiffer, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, Installation view, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Courtesy Guggenheim Museum Bilbao