Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist, a pioneer of spatial video art, was born in 1962 in Grabs, in the Swiss Rhine Valley near the Austrian border. She studied commercial art, illustration and photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1982 to 1986 and subsequently studied audiovisual communications at the School of Design in Basel. Since the mid-1980s, she has played a significant role in the development of video and installation art. Rist first attracted international attention with the energetic and irreverent language of single-channel videos such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Pickelporno (1992). Her practice has evolved alongside developments in audiovisual technology, whose possibilities she explores through a playful and experimental approach. Using large-scale projections, saturated colours, sound and digital image manipulation, she creates immersive environments that evoke the flows and associations of a collective consciousness. Works such as Sip My Ocean (1996) and Worry Will Vanish (2014) surround viewers with slowly moving images and vivid fields of colour, transforming architectural space into a multisensory experience. For Rist, vulnerability is a source of strength and artistic inspiration. Her intimate recordings of bodies and natural environments situate human beings within, rather than apart from, the natural world. Through exploratory editing and shifts in scale and perspective, she examines perception, embodiment and the relationship between the individual and their surroundings. Her installations invite viewers to recline, move and linger within them, treating the mind, senses and body as sites of continuous discovery and poetic invention. Pixel Forest (2016) consists of approximately 3,000 illuminated elements suspended from the ceiling on cables. The installation evokes a video screen dispersed throughout the gallery, allowing visitors to move physically among its individual pixels and experience a three-dimensional field of changing light and colour. As Rist 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’s work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions and screenings worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include Electric Idyll at Fire Station, Doha (2024); Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon at Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York (2023–2024); Behind Your Eyelid at Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2022); Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles (2021–2022); and Your Eye Is My Island at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, and Art Tower Mito (2021). Earlier major exhibitions include Åbn min Lysning. Open My Glade at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2019); Sip My Ocean at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017–2018); Pixel Forest at the New Museum, New York (2016–2017); and Your Saliva Is My Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain at Kunsthaus Zürich (2016). In 2025, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing presented Your Palm Is My Universe, an immersive solo exhibition centred on a newly commissioned, site-specific video and sound installation that transformed the museum’s Great Hall.