Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom
30th November, 2024 – 16th March, 2025
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra
2 48009 Bilbao

Curators: Clara Kim, Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Paula Kroll,
Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in collaboration with Marta Blàvia, Associate Curator at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, with sponsorship from BBK, presents Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, the artist’s largest survey exhibition in Europe. Featuring over thirty works spanning his career, this exhibition cements Pfeiffer as one of today’s most influential artists.

Born in Honolulu in 1966 and based in New York, Pfeiffer’s multidisciplinary practice—incorporating video, photography, sculpture, and installation—explores themes of spectacle, belonging, and difference. Known primarily for incisive videos derived from a media-saturated world, he questions how images shape spectatorship, posing, “Who’s using who? Is the image making us, or do we make images?”

For over twenty-five years, Pfeiffer has utilized early digital editing tools like Photoshop and QuarkXPress to manipulate footage from sports, concerts, and Hollywood films. Through iterative acts of cutting, splicing, masking, and cloning, his work reveals structures underlying collective memory, evoking repressed fears and desires and anticipating the digital age’s mass sharing of short clips and GIFs. Examining how stadiums and stages have historically functioned as sites for grand spectacles and identity-shaping experiences, Pfeiffer unveils spaces where the body politic—whether of a nation, community, or society—is both defined and contested.

Iconic figures like pop stars, actors, and athletes appear in Pfeiffer’s works, embodying intersections of veneration and objectification that drive mass culture. His use of celebrity culture reflects the global circulation of images, and his works reveal how viewership mechanisms, from architectural spaces to post-production, shape perceptions of self, community, and, at times, nationhood. By restaging collective events where individual identities blur, Pfeiffer highlights how such spectacles foster belonging and identity while underscoring questions of difference and otherness.

In Pfeiffer’s work, shifts from miniature to monumental scale destabilize the “natural” relationship between viewer and object, prompting awareness of our bodies in relation to a broader, constructed world. His iconic early video and photographic works invite close inspection, while recent sculptures and installations immerse viewers in expansive, cinematic experiences.

Inspired by the temporary architecture of a studio soundstage, the exhibition design reflects Pfeiffer’s fascination with Hollywood’s labor-intensive fabrication. His frequent references to filmmaking and the apparatus of the camera evoke iconic scenes embedded in collective memory. The exhibition title, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, nods to a pivotal moment in American media history: Cecil B. DeMille’s introduction of The Ten Commandments (1956), an epic that was, at its release, the most expensive film ever made.

Pfeiffer’s biography—spanning childhood in the Philippines and the United States—imparts a transnational perspective on American identity. Deeply engaged with Philippine history and its unique racial, religious, and cultural blend shaped by colonialism and global labor movements, Pfeiffer’s work reflects on diaspora and the complex construction of identity. Through this lens, he investigates a politics of visibility, shaped by mass media, collective entertainment rituals, and popular culture, which, in turn, highlight the intersections of commonality and difference.

Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom opens on the 30th of November, 2024 until the 16th of March, 2025 at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

©2024 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao