From sports arenas to Justin Bieber: inside Paul Pfeiffer’s dismantling of our visual imagination

For over twenty-five years, Paul Pfeiffer has been dismantling and reassembling the images that shape our collective imagination. At the center of his practice is not the spectacle itself, but what it produces: attention, belonging, identification, power. It happens visibly in one of his most visually striking and best-known works, Incarnation, in which Justin Bieber’s body is literally placed on a cross and then broken down into a constellation of sculptural fragments, modelled after Catholic saints. The sculptures, produced by Filipino encarnadores based on the pop star’s image, transform Bieber into a contemporary Christ figure, a teenage saint whose limbs function as relics and media fetishes at the same time. In his work, video, photography, sound, and installation become tools for examining how major contemporary rituals—sporting events, concerts, television broadcasts—function, along with the architectures that make them possible: the display, the set, the arena. Above all, however, there is one site that Pfeiffer has consistently identified as capable of concentrating all these dynamics: the stadium. “If you want to understand where political and economic action is really concentrated today,” he says, “in a sense, it all crystallizes in the stadium.”

Distance is the starting point. “I didn’t grow up in a family interested in sports,” Pfeiffer recalls. “My parents were musicians and worked in sacred music, so I had no real familiarity with the language of secular spectacle.” Born in Honolulu in 1966 and raised primarily in the Philippines, he spent his childhood in a Protestant environment shaped more by sound than by image. “It was a world focused on music, not visual spectacle. Sculptures of saints, stained-glass windows, incense—those belonged to Catholic churches, not mine. And yet that distance fascinated me. Even there, I was an outside observer.”

Paul Pfeiffer

It was precisely that distance that turned into fascination the first time he entered a stadium—a space destined to become central to his research. “I think it was that same distance that was reactivated when I first entered Madison Square Garden,” he says. “The crowd, the sound, the shared affection—everything struck me because it was unfamiliar to me.”

In that space, Pfeiffer immediately recognizes something that goes beyond entertainment: a temporary suspension of individual identity in favor of the collective, and at the same time the construction of the individual through belonging and participation in a shared ritual. The dynamics of the mass, he observes, are rooted in ancient structures—echoing what Elias Canetti describes in "Crowds and Power", where the crowd emerges through the momentary erasure of differences. “However technologically advanced it may be,” Pfeiffer notes, “what happens in the stadium responds to basic human needs. It is a belief system.”

But the issue, he emphasizes, is not only anthropological. It is also political. “At a certain point, I asked myself: who is shaping all this, and why?”

The question of who shapes these rituals—and to what end—leads Pfeiffer to architecture, understood not simply as built form but as a cultural device. “One of the first lessons of classical architecture,” he observes, “is that its principles apply not only to buildings: they extend to the city, to the nation, and are conceived as cosmic or divine.” In this perspective, forms do not merely organize space; they orient behavior.

In contemporary society, the stadium becomes the architectural typology in which this continuity is most clearly manifested. On the one hand, there is physical presence: thousands of bodies reacting as a single entity. On the other, technological mediation—cameras, microphones, screens, replays, live direction. “The presence of 80,000 people in the stands and the simultaneous mediation of the broadcast,” Pfeiffer explains, “generate a form of collective attention that transcends individual experience.”

Intense performance and intense mediation coexist in the same place. This is where sport, entertainment, politics, and a secularized form of religion overlap. “The stadium is not just about sport,” he states. “It is the overlap of all the processes of society.” “It is no coincidence,” he adds, “that Donald Trump chose Madison Square Garden for the first public event of his second term.” But it is precisely this centrality that makes the stadium a fragile terrain. “To take apart its narrative is to get immediately to the heart of the system,” and in a climate marked by fear and self-censorship, “anything other than pure celebration quickly becomes suspect.”

Paul Pfeiffer

If architecture allows us to observe collective behavior, it is through images that Pfeiffer investigates the workings of the mind. “I use what gets stuck in my head,” he explains. “If an image keeps coming back to me, I imagine it happens to others.” “The image is a way of intervening in the viewer’s mind. The real material of the work is not the video, but the psychology of the viewer.”

The tools may change with technology, but the underlying logic remains the same. “I try to intensify what already works, to push it to the point of disturbance. This is a very common principle in Surrealist art, which I feel my work connects to in some way. I want to reveal how unstable what we perceive as reality really is.”

Pfeiffer’s work initially takes shape through found footage. “At first, I spent time in small shops looking for VHS tapes. It was extremely difficult to find material.” Over more than twenty-five years of searching, what changes most dramatically is the quality and circulation of images. “Today everything is available, and in very high definition.” Boxing is an emblematic example: “Within twenty-four hours, you can find footage in 4K or 8K, slowed down. Almost naked bodies struck with great force. Images of physical violence circulating freely.” For Pfeiffer, this overabundance is not neutral—it reshapes how we perceive the body, violence, and collective emotional response. “We make images,” he concludes, “but images also make us.”

For Pfeiffer, the transition from the live event to the exhibition space is not a simple transfer of images, but a transformation of experience. At the center is presentation: how an image is encountered, how much time is afforded to it, from what distance, and through which manipulations. “The loop doesn’t have a beginning and an end like a film. It’s a choice. If you think about it, it makes the video more like a sculpture—the viewer decides how long to stay.”

This principle leads him, as early as the 1990s, to intervene directly in the material of the image—through loops, extreme slowdowns, and partial erasures of the visual field—in order to recirculate those images within an alternative regime of visibility. At the same time, he designs exhibition devices that create a visual and media circuit parallel to the official one, removing images from dominant modes of broadcast and destabilizing their identity, authority, and presumed veracity. “I used small armatures that protruded from the wall. They projected images just a few inches wide. You would walk into a semi-dark room, see only a point of light, and have to move closer and closer to understand what you were looking at.”

Paul Pfeiffer

The operation is deliberately ambiguous, almost voyeuristic. By subtracting information, slowing down time, and erasing portions of the image, Pfeiffer exposes the mechanisms of seduction and control that govern our relationship with images. “It’s a peeping mechanism: the beholder becomes the watched. It’s a way of exposing the psychology of the image,” he says—an approach marked by a clear Duchampian legacy, in which the act of observing becomes an integral part of the work. “The work is born in contact with the live event and then brought back to the museum,” Pfeiffer explains. “But it’s not documentation. It’s a way of showing how these systems produce our collective experience.” This practice has moved through institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and now arrives at Pista 500 at Pinacoteca Agnelli with Vitruvian Figure (Juventus) (2025), a project developed in collaboration with Juventus.

The Turin project stems from direct access to the inner workings of the stadium, made possible in part by the relationship between Pinacoteca Agnelli and Juventus. Pfeiffer is less interested in those who perform on the field than in those who construct the apparatus of spectacle—in that level of control where images, sounds, and rhythms are orchestrated in real time. This is why he does not ask to follow the players, but those who govern the event, reversing the point of view of spectators who normally watch the game from their couch at home. “I asked to follow the team that runs the stadium’s direction. No one ever looks at them, but they’re the ones who build the experience.” During the Juventus–Inter derby, he goes behind the scenes of the production apparatus. “I was there during the match. I was following the cameras, the shots, the construction of rhythm.” Inside the director’s van, thirty or forty people work among monitors, microphones, and video feeds. Among the images is footage from a new camera mounted on the referee’s head. “At a certain point, you see the players arguing with the referee as if you were him.” It is there that the nature of the stadium becomes fully apparent: “That’s when I understood, viscerally, what the stadium is—a total media system.”

Paul Pfeiffer

Vitruvian Figure (Juventus) (2025) emerged from this experience. Installed on Pista 500—the former FIAT test track on the roof of the Lingotto—the work brings into relation two infrastructures conceived for mass production. “There’s something about the Lingotto that has to do with repetition and rhythm,” Pfeiffer observes. “It’s a building designed to produce a mass object. And that’s what brings it close to the logic of the stadium.” The work is composed of two elements. The first is an image of Allianz Stadium digitally expanded to a hyperbolic scale, created through 3D modeling software that increases its capacity to one million spectators. By pushing the structure beyond its functional limits, Pfeiffer strains the relationship between vision, sound, and crowd density to the point at which they become almost unmanageable. The image points to a scenario in which technology increasingly collapses the distance between collective physical participation and the individualized experience mediated by screens, redefining the very boundaries of the public event.

The second component is aural. Starting from recordings of the match, Pfeiffer constructs an immersive environment in which the voices of the crowd are reworked to foreground their choral dimension: chants, slogans, and percussive rhythms are synchronized until they merge into a single, continuous emission. The result is not the sum of individual presences, but the transformation of the multitude into a compact sonic body, in which the distinction between individual and collective dissolves.

The title of the work explicitly recalls Vitruvius, author of the oldest architectural treatise to have come down to us, and with it the idea of an ideal proportion between body, space, and social order. In Vitruvian Figure (Juventus) (2025), this legacy is projected into a speculative horizon, where an ancient architectural model is reworked through contemporary tools. The result is not a utopian vision, but a critical device that invites reflection on the urban, behavioral, social, and political implications of new systems of aggregation and control.