Stephanie Cristello: "THE BEAUTY OF INVOKING GHOSTS"

Tucked into a discreet passageway of artist Paul Pfeiffer’s traveling 25-year retrospective — designed in collaboration with architect Koray Duman, and now on view at the MCA Chicago — the eponymous film work, Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom (2000), pictures a disappearing act. The two-channel film features movie director Cecil B. DeMille’s overture to his 1956 Technicolor film The Ten Commandments, emerging on stage from behind the pale blue damask and gold-fringed curtain only to vanish again. He is about to introduce the story of Exodus, one of the five books of Moses, but the speech dissolves before it begins. The words that compose the title of both the work and the exhibition are never uttered.

Known for his meticulous video manipulations and use of pop culture to deconstruct systems of power, Pfeiffer’s practice explores the visual languages of sports, celebrity, and spectacle to expose the underlying structures of race, religion, and empire. His works are held in major collections around the world, and his long-awaited retrospective traverses multiple continents and cultural contexts. For this ambitious presentation, he partnered with Duman, an award-winning architect and founder of the New York-based studio Büro Koray Duman, whose civic-minded designs emphasize the role of spatial storytelling in public life. The collaboration spans three venues — MOCA Los Angeles, Guggenheim Bilbao, concluding at the MCA Chicago — with each iteration reimagined in response to the architecture of its host site.

In the original Prologue, DeMille follows the phrase itself — the birth of freedom — by posing a binary: “Are men the property of the state? Or are they free souls under God?” It is a question meant to dramatize how a moral conflict in ancient times might find its footing in the mid-century United States. This, of course, falls apart in a contemporary context, as our political climate is marked by an increasingly unstable democracy, the dissolution between church and state, and the resurgence of white Christian nationalism in public discourse. As we know, “freedom” is less a neutral invocation of liberty than a veiled assertion of dominion. In Pfeiffer’s version, this voice is gone — transforming the scene instead into something spectral, suspended. Reflecting on how the show draws from structures of religion, government, and the public commons, Duman and Pfeiffer sat with curator and author Stephanie Cristello to discuss the haunting elements of architecture and culture that guide the exhibition and its design.

At the MCA, this unfolds as a sequence of charged spatial encounters — hushed, chapel-like chambers that make use of the museum’s arched galleries, where viewers drift through echoes, shadows, and screens. The result is less a retrospective than a ritual: a ghostly procession through images and our memory of them to see how these expressions of devotion manifest from the masses to the intimate. We begin in the year 2000, as the arc of Pfeiffer’s practice builds to our present moment.