Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing

Floor 6

Born 1987 in the UK
Lives in Los Angeles, CA

Early in their career as an artist, P. Staff worked as a choreographer. A sense of live encounter remains important in the work on view, as does the idea of experiencing a work of art with the whole body. Their installation’s title, Afferent Nerves, refers to the nerve fibers that channel sensory information from the outside world into the brain, bringing touch, temperature, and pain to the central nervous system— an idea that reimagines the gallery as a kind of body, permeated here by a sense of danger.

Staff bathes the installation in an acidic yellow light. A live electrical net hangs above the gallery, out of reach but audibly buzzing, suggesting the possibility of a physical shock. A photographic self- portrait of the artist on the far wall shows their hands covering their face in a gesture suggestive of suffering or retreat. Staff has described the aesthetic of their work as relating to “a particular trans mode of being that exists in the tension between dissociation and hypervigilance.”