Dodd Professorial Chair, Paul Pfeiffer, presents three major video works: Desiderata, Fragment of a Crucifixion, and Pure Products Go Crazy. Best known for digitally manipulated images of athletes and celebrities, Pfeiffer’s celebrated work in the mediums of installation, photography, and video typically uses extant imagery as an occasion to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer’s acclaimed objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities – professional sports, televised game shows, Michael Jackson – to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, politics and nationhood. 

Represented by the Paula Cooper gallery in New York City, Pfeiffer has had numerous solo exhibitions at a diverse array of institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2001), the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (2001), the Barbican Art Centre in London (2001), Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, MA (2003), The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2003), The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu (2003), Gagosian Gallery in New York (2004), MUSAC -  Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Léon, Spain (2008), Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2009),  and The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Malate Manlia, Phillipines (2015), among others.