Pipilotti Rist - Hayward Gallery

 Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist fuses dazzling colour, sensual images and mesmerising music to create immersive video installations in which the visitors themselves become important elements.

This exhibition, her first survey in the UK, presents videos, sculptures and installations spanning her career from the 1980s to the present day, including two works specially created for the Hayward Gallery (Administrating Eternity, a vast, immersive artwork which she describes as ‘a forest of light’, and Hiplights Or Enlighted Hips, an extraordinary outdoor light work created from hundreds of pairs of underpants). Rist wants the exhibition to provoke feelings of energy, serenity and enlightenment, and hopes that her work makes visitors smile.

Video

Pipilotti Rist made her first experimental videos in the late 1980s. These were single-channel videos; works that involve a single tape, one playback device and one display mode, such as a TV screen.  While music plays a large part in these, Rist’s main interest is in the perceived failings and shortcomings of video. "I’m interested in feedback and generation losses, like colour noise and bleeds. In my experiments with video it becomes clear to me how these supposedly, faulty, opportune images are like the pictures in my own subconscious."

Sculpture

Rist began to make sculptural works in order to escape the confines of the two-dimensional screen, and to open herself up to multiple possibilities. By combining videos with everyday objects, she changes their nature and imbues the most ordinary events or objects with a sense of wonder. Believing that the objects that surround us contain memories and have stories to tell, Rist integrates video projectors and screens in unexpected things and places: tiny monitors are hidden in handbags or displayed on a gigantic lettuce,  projectors are placed in a watering-can and a hanging saucepan, and a book, a vase and a chair are all used as projection surfaces.

 

Installation

Soon after making her first experimental videos, Pipilotti Rist started creating environments that influenced the way in which her works were seen. Videos are projected in unexpected ways in order to manipulate scale, context and the position of the spectator. Works are projected at angles on the wall, or onto the floor so that visitors can move in and around them, and also become part of them. Over the years, Rist has progressively redefined this relationship between audience and art work, creating all-enveloping visual environments that place particular importance on the viewer’s physical presence. Rist comments: ’When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free. In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within.’ These immersive installations are, in effect, an invitation into a parallel world – into Pipilotti’s world.

Biography

Pipilotti Rist was born Elisabeth Charlotte Rist in Grabs, Switzerland, in 1962. As a teenager she renamed herself Pipilotti in honour of Pippi Longstocking, the fearless, funny and uninhibited heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books.

Rist studied graphic design in Vienna, where she made Super-8 animation films, created stage sets for bands and did a lot of drawing. Deciding that she wanted to work with moving images, she returned to Switzerland to study video in Basel. Her first video work, I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, was made there in 1986 while she was still a student. Soon afterwards, she began working as a freelance video technician and joined the folk-punk band and performance group Les Reines Prochaines.

Since the early 1990s, Rist’s films and installations have been shown in museums and galleries, at international biennales and festivals, on television, and in public spaces such as Times Square in New York. Her work was shown in the Swiss Pavilion at the 1994 São Paulo Biennale and she represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 (and was also invited to exhibit at the International Pavilion in Venice in 1995, 1997 and 2011). In 2008 she created a large video installation, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), for the atrium of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Her first feature film, Pepperminta, which tells the story of an ‘anarchist of the imagination’, was released in 2009 at the Venice Film Festival.

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/rist/exhibition