Following the performance of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Rafiq Bhatia’s On Blue, artist P. Staff and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster reflect on the intersections of dreams and consciousness, and mortality and breath, in a moment defined by the shared vulnerabilities of environmental harm. For Staff, death is an antonym of power—a transformative force that transcends societal, physical, and existential boundaries. Webster, meanwhile, draws on psychoanalytic theory to examine the psychological and poetic dimensions of breath as a site of interdependence.
P. Staff is a British interdisciplinary artist whose work interrogates how history, technology, the law, and state and corporate power shape and define our physical bodies and social worlds. Staff’s work across video installation, sculpture, and poetry gives visibility to the myriad ways bodies—especially marginalized bodies—are regulated and disciplined under capitalism, drawing on necropolitics, affect theory, queer and trans studies, and Staff’s independent training in end-of-life care and death doula work. On Venus, a 2019 video installation that debuted in a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London and reappeared in the 59th Venice Biennale, collages a jarring images of the industrial farming of urine, semen, meat, and fur with a poetic meditation of life on the planet Venus. More recently, their 2023 site-specific installation at Kunsthalle Basel, In Ekstase, made use of light, sound, film, holograms, animal blood, and live electrical netting to address the precarious state of bodily autonomy within the medical-industrial complex. Staff has held other notable solo exhibitions at venues such as LUMA, Arles (2021); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2020); and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019).
Jamieson Webster is an American psychoanalyst, professor, and writer. Her interdisciplinary work combines psychoanalytic theory with philosophy, literature, film, and cultural criticism to consider questions of consciousness, reality, and identity. Webster’s first book, The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books 2011) examines the legacy of psychoanalysis, including its perceived decline in popularity, and argues for its continued relevance in contemporary thinking around the human body and psyche. More recently, Webster authored Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis (Columbia University Press, 2018), which uses memoir, theoretical investigation, and clinical cases to trace the enigmatic transformation of psychic energy into bodily symptoms. Her newest book, On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe (Catapult, 2025), is a narrative nonfiction work about care and dependence in an age of environmental catastrophe. Webster teaches courses focused on the intersections of philosophy, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalytic theory at the New School for Social Research. She regularly contributes to publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books.
After On Blue is made possible by The Tisch Discovery Series. The Tisch Discovery Series—a dynamic selection of commissions, performances, and dialogues presented throughout the week—are made possible through a generous gift from Steve Tisch and Jamie Tisch.