Homo sapiens sapiens. 2005
Audio-video installation (video still)

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Homo sapiens sapiens. 2005
Audio-video installation (video still)

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Videostill. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Gravity Be My Friend. 2007

Audio/ video installation (video still)

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Himalaya’s Sister’s Living Room. 2000
Audio/ video installation (video still)

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Videostill. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

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Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters). 2008

Audio/ video installation (video still)

Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London and Luhring Augustine, New York

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If you are not familiar with the work of Swiss artist PIPILOTTI RIST, she works mainly with video/audio installations because there is room in them for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement, lousy, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonition of death, sex and friendliness) – like in a compact handbag.

By working intensively with this medium, PIPILOTTI RIST has more or less reinvented art. Her unique universe has the sensuality and depth of painting, but is created through enchanting video images and hallucinatory soundtracks. She likes to employ extreme close-ups with a fisheye lens, breath taking hand camera travelling and rhythmic poetical editing rather to transform the visual spectacle into a total sensory experience where the bodies (often her own body) are enticingly free and turns viewer into voyeur.

Large or small, unifying or splintering into a host of different elements, RIST’s installations are expansive, finding in the mind and body the possibility of endless discovery. She explains: “The idea is that now we’ve explored the whole geographical world, pictures or films are the new, unexplored spaces into which we can escape“.

PIPILOTTI RIST lives and works in Zürich and the mountains of Switzerland. Since emerging on the international art scene in the mid-1980s, she has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and is one of the most celebrated video artists working today. She recently was awarded the Joan Mirò Prize 2009 for her wide-ranging creative activity and her outstanding contribution to the current artistic scene.

And good news: you can view her latest exhibition Electronic Feelings at Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona until November 1st, 2010