Paul Pfeiffer: Pasodoble

Thomas Dane Gallery is delighted to premiere a new single screen video installation by Paul Pfeiffer: _Pasodoble_ (2026). Filmed across three interconnected sites—a bull breeding farm outside Seville, an historic bullring in Bilbao, and a mobile broadcast van outside that bullring—the work traces the networks that sustain one of the world's most enduring and contested public spectacles: bullfighting. Together, these three sites form an interconnected ecology in which labour, performance and mediation sustain "a regime of sensory immersion that orchestrates perception."[1] In _Pasodoble_, Pfeiffer turns his attention to the structures and practices that frame, circulate and perpetuate the ritual event of the _corrida_. The bullring emerges as a place where the visceral and the theatrical converge, a space in which gestures, audiences and architecture combine to produce a complexly orchestrated collective experience. Working across these three sites, in a digressive and nonlinear form, Pfeiffer shifts his attention away from the climactic moments traditionally associated with the corrida. Instead, _Pasodoble_ foregrounds the intricate and interdependent dynamics by which collective acts of witness and imaging, enfolded in intense sonic structures organised around violent acts, produce profound instances of feeling and complexly coded meanings. If, as Maya Deren wrote, "[a] ritual is an action distinguished from all others in that it seeks the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form," and therefore "[i]n ritual, the form is the meaning,"[2] then Pfeiffer's _Pasodoble_ disaggregates and reassesses the elaboration of this ritual form across the varying sites and practices that sustain bullfighting's choreography of life and death. Throughout his practice, Pfeiffer has explored the cultural power of spectacle, and the ways in which images reorganise desire, belief and memory as core elements within elaborate technologies of mediation and representation that act on our collective consciousness. Within that framework, sound, language, and mimicry—whether in the form of the speech choir (_Live from Neverland_, 2006), a pop song (_Incarnator_, 2019), or military music (_The Saints_, 2008)—have served as significant aesthetic materials in Pfeiffer's examination of the historical movements of meaning through the imperial and diasporic circuits of culture. This new work extends those longstanding concerns, and resonates with earlier works like _Red Green_ _Blue_ (2022–23), _Three Figures in a Room_ (2015), and _The Saints_ (2008) by approaching mass public rituals, and their corollary architectures and techniques, as a lens through which broader questions of spectatorship, power and collective feeling can be richly considered through their historical evolution and their aesthetic forms.