The Body as a Site of Resistance: A Panel Discussion with P. Staff, Mel Y. Chen, and Mara Hassan, moderated by Jeanne Gerrity

Much of P. Staff’s oeuvre is concerned with the idea of bodies, how they are scrutinized and evaluated, and how gender is a construct that is used to classify people, perpetuate violence, and marginalize individuals. Taking Staff’s exhibition The Prince of Homburg as a starting point, this panel looks at how governments and institutions control and suppress life, assigning value to bodies and viewing transness as a threat to social order. While the state organizes bodies and minds through toxic systems, this panel considers alternative ways of being that resist this imperial and harmful logic.

P. Staff is an internationally acclaimed artist who has had major solo exhibitions at David Zwirner in New York and Kunsthalle Basel, and was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Venice Biennale. Mel Y. Chen is a UC Berkeley scholar of gender, race, disability, and queer studies whose work examines animacy, toxicity, and the material politics of embodiment across colonial and contemporary contexts. Mara Hassan is a curator, writer, and art historian currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Art History at Stanford University whose research operates at the intersection of critical theory, transgendered ontologies, and the visual arts.

A tour of The Prince of Homburg with artist P. Staff immediately follows the discussion.