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Pipilotti Rist
Related Legs (Yokohama Dandelions), 2001

Photo: ©ImagenSubliminal (Miguel de Guzman + Rocio Romero)
@imagensubliminal

Pipilotti Rist

Collection

Abundant Futures

Two-channel video installation,
color, sound, 21:51 min
Lace curtains, children’s chairs

Working primarily with video, sound, and installation, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist has been creating hauntingly beautiful compositions that explore the relationships between the natural environment, the body, and inner psychological landscapes since the mid 1980s. This work evokes a state of trance-like liminality, using fragmented and rotating video sequences, projected onto an arrangement of old-fashioned lace curtains hung at various heights, as well as onto the floor and walls of the exhibition space. This ambient fluidity is the result of a projection through a mirror scanner, which makes the imagery wander following a circular course coupled with a fixed projection. It is intensified by drum rhythms, dreamy and ethereal sounds, and the laughter of a girl. Visitors move through the flow of color-saturated images that seem at once hallucinatory, real, and manifestly synthetic: two women in the street in high heels and knee-length skirts, a naked woman crouching on the floor and jumping across a doctor’s office, a woman smearing her make-up against a window, gas burners rotating like abstract haloes, dandelions moving in the breeze, a TV monitor burning, and other such scenes. Shot with different film equipment and dynamically edited, the images result from camera work that eludes stable spatial references and confuses coordinates and cardinal points, creating an unsettling mix of desirous pleasure with a sense of fear and disorientation. In Rist’s feminist terms, these strong sensory and embodied impressions are supposed to reinforce a sense of intimacy, fragility, and affect, also inspiring a desire for joyful rebellion.

Born in Grabs, Switzerland, in 1962. Lives in Zurich, Switzerland.