Talk | Paul Pfeiffer, Iyko Day, and Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa

About the Event

In celebration of the opening of Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, join us for a talk between exhibiting artist Paul Pfeiffer, artist and writer Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, and writer and theoretician Iyko Day. Together they discuss the full breadth of Pfeiffer’s practice, considering the shifting terrain of image-making, and its changing meanings and impact in contemporary society.

Access Information

CART captioning is provided. To request additional accessibility services like ASL interpretation or audio description, please contact us via email at [email protected] or call 312-397-4076.

About the Speakers

Paul Pfeiffer is an artist living and working in New York City, who has been making work in video, photography, installation, and sculpture since the late 1990s. Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of mass media spectacle to examine how images shape our awareness of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube and other sources, he uses these to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer’s objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, and human consciousness. Pfeiffer has had many one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003 and 2017–18); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005); MUSAC León, Spain (2008); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2011); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015); Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); and The Athenaeum, Athens, GA (2023). He has presented work in major international exhibitions, most recently the Performa Biennial and the Honolulu Biennial in 2019 and the Toronto Biennial and Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2022. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; M+, Hong Kong; The Guggenheim; Tate Modern; and the Pinault Collection, among many others.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race & Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is also a faculty member and former co-chair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism and recently co-edited the special issue “Palestine After Analogy” with Nasser Abourahme for Critical Ethnic Studies journal.

Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (British/Ugandan) is an artist, writer and editor based in the United States. Recent exhibitions include Scene at Eastman (George Eastman Museum, 2024-25); recent publications include “ECHO—LOCATION” (e-flux Journal 153, April 2025) and INDEX 2025 (Roma Publications #485).