The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announces Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, on view May 3 through August 31, 2025. Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom is a survey that covers 25 years of work from artist Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii; lives in New York), whose practice interrogates ideas of spectacle, celebrity, and mass culture. The exhibition brings together works from across Pfeiffer’s career, spanning his early photo and video works to his latest experiments in sculpture and installation. Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom focuses on the artist’s use of media manipulation to reveal audiences’ participation in both adoration and objectification.

Whether through televised broadcasts of sporting events, editorial photographs of cultural icons, or the ecstasy of a soccer stadium, Pfeiffer interrogates the consumption of images and culture. For Pfeiffer, the basketball court, the boxing ring, and the stadium not only serve as platforms for grand spectacles but as sites where the body politic—of a nation, of a community, of society—is imagined, defined, and contested.