Pipilotti Rist

Pipirotti List

30 March - 19 May 2001

Zürich

Pole vaulting in the chapel, bicycling in the laundromat, sky diving in the elevator shaft – such seemingly surrealist combinations of spaces and unexpected uses were outlined by architect Bernard Tschumi as early as 1983. The Löwenbräu building in Zurich is a striking example of this tendency (which has meanwhile become a fashion) to assign new functions to existing urban structures.

Pipilotti Rist, the Swiss video artist, has her first show at the Galerie Hauser & Wirth, inaugurating their new exhibition space on the ground floor of the former brewery building. Her new video installation, conceived specially for this space, makes the stimulating potential of the idea of converting and reprogramming spaces the starting point of her intervention.

Communicating with the existing architecture and its former use, Pipilotti Rist examines potential other, new activities that can take place in a space apart from its objectivised use. Her goal is to activate widely differing, simultaneous and overlapping uses. Leaving the architecture as authentic and intact as possible, she follows the transparently readable traces of the work once done here: beer spurts from the tiled pillars, and rusty iron hooks jut out into the room. The space conjures up images oscillating from a sacred cathedral to a mysterious hammam or a copper beverage storage.

The video projections focus on the fuzzy boundaries between inside and outside with concentrated, almost autistic attentiveness. The floatingly subjective camera pays homage to the traces of human activity. It takes a human being to experience space, and so the experiencing visitor becomes part of the artist’s probing: is it human movement and activity that generate the experience of a space? Does movement and body behaviour for example in a fitness studio differ from that in an exhibition space? Is body behaviour caught up in predetermined patterns of use? Do different spatial concepts bring about different patterns of movement, gaze and body awareness? What happens if contexts of use overlap – if for example people exercise in an exhibition space while others look at art exhibits in a fitness studio? And is it not that after visiting an art show we feel the need for mental and physical relaxation in a meditative landscape?

This exhibition project is in collaboration with CIT Trainings-Center, Limmatstrasse 270, CH-8005 Zürich.

Installation views

About the Artist

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born 1962 in Grabs in the Swiss Rhine Valley on the Austrian Border and has been a central figure within the international art scene since the mid-1980s.

Astounding the art world with the energetic exorcistic statement of her now famous single channel videos, such as ‘I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much,’ 1986 and ‘Pickelporno,’ 1992, her artistic work has co-developed with technical advancements and in playful exploration of its new possibilities to propose footage resembling a collective brain. Through large video projections and digital manipulation, she has developed immersive installations that draw life from slow caressing showers of vivid color tones, like her works ‘Sip My Ocean,’ 1996 or ‘Worry Will Vanish,’ 2014.

For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest,’ 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape... The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’

Since 1984, Rist has had countless solo and group exhibitions, and video screenings worldwide. Her recent solo exhibitions are 'Electric Idyll' at the Fire Station Doha (2024), 'Prickling Goosebumps & A Humming Horizon' at Hauser & Wirth New York and Luhring Augustine Chelsea (2023-24), 'Behind Your Eyelid' at Tai Kwun Hong Kong (2022), ‘Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ at The Geffen Contemporary, MOCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (2021 – 2022), ‘Your Eye Is My Island’ at MoMAK, The National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and ART TOWER MITO (2021). ‘Åbn min Lysning. Open my Glade’ at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebæk Denmark (2019), ‘Sip My Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2017 – 2018), ‘Pixel Forest’ at New Museum New York (2016 – 2017) and ‘Your Saliva is My Diving Suit of the Ocean of Pain’ at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016), all resulted in record-breaking attendance numbers for each institution. A major exhibition is planned for summer 2025 at UCCA Beijing.

Learn more about this artist