From Constraint to Ecstasy: Reimaging Art with Tiona Nekkia McClodden and P. Staff

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Conversations | From Constraint to Ecstasy: Reimaging Art with Tiona Nekkia McClodden and P. Staff 
Spotlighting their current respective solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, this talk addresses the practices of artists Tiona Nekkia McClodden and P. Staff. They discuss how they reimagine the experience of art through their interests in poetics, queer politics, desire, and mechanisms of control with curator Elena Filipovic. 
Curated in collaboration with Kunsthalle Basel. 
Tiona Nekkia McClodden, artist, Philadelphia P. Staff, artist, Los Angeles and London Moderator: Elena Filipovic, Director and Curator, Kunsthalle Basel&nbsp;
Tiona Nekkia McClodden is a visual artist, filmmaker, and curator whose work explores and critiques issues at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and social commentary. McClodden’s interdisciplinary approach traverses documentary film, experimental video, sculpture, and sound installations. Most recently, her work has explored the themes of re-memory and narrative biomythography. Tiona lives and works in North Philadelphia, PA, and is the Founder + Owner of Philadelphia-based, Conceptual Fade, a micro-gallery and library space centering Black thought + artistic production. Nekkia McClodden is represented by Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, New York.


P. Staff is an artist based in Los Angeles and London. Their current exhibition In Ekstase is presented at the Kunsthalle Basel until 10 September 2023. Staff's work draws from a wide-ranging assortment of influences, including necropolitics, affect theory, and transpoetics, as well as their own studies in modern dance, astrology, and end of life care. In their interdisciplinary practice, these varying threads serve to emphasise the processes by which bodies – especially those of people who are queer, trans, or disabled – are interpreted, regulated, and disciplined in a rigorously controlled society.&nbsp; P. Staff is represented by gallery Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, Mexico City and Galerie Sultana, Paris.
Elena Filipovic is director and curator of Kunsthalle Basel. From 2009-2014, she served as senior curator of WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. She was curator of the Croatian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Art in 2022 and was co-curator, with Adam Szymczyk, of When things cast no shadow, the 5th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2008. She writes widely about contemporary art, has edited several compendiums on exhibition histories, and is the author of David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (Afterall Books, 2017) and The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2016). The Art Basel 2023 Conversations program is curated by Emily Butler. Coordination and support: Arianna Guidi.