Pipilotti Rist

Directing

Pipilotti Rist

Born

1962-06-21 (64)

Place of birth

Grabs, Switzerland

Known for

Directing

Credits

45 titles

Pipilotti Rist is a visual artist. She is best known for creating experiential video art and installation art that often portray self-portraits and singing. Her work is often described as surreal, intimate, abstract art, having a preoccupation with the female body.

Known for

Kulturplatz poster
6.0

No synopsis available yet.

Kulturplatz

2004

No artwork available
NR

No synopsis available yet.

NeXt

1994

Pepperminta poster
5.8

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.

Pepperminta

2009

Stories on Human Rights poster
2.2

20 short films about human rights.

Stories on Human Rights

2008

Here Is Always Somewhere Else poster
6.0

The life and work of enigmatic Dutch/Californian conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, who in 1975 disappeared under mysterious circumstances at sea in the smallest boat ever to cross the Atlantic. As seen through the eyes of fellow emigrant filmmaker René Daalder, the picture becomes a sweeping overview of contemporary art films as well as an epic saga of the transformative powers of the ocean.

Here Is Always Somewhere Else

2007

Rainwoman (I Am Called a Plant) poster
NR

This sensual, slow-motion video installation shows the artist, with her shocking-pink hair, lying naked on the rain-soaked earth.

Rainwoman (I Am Called a Plant)

1999

Film credits

2000s · 2 titles

1990s · 6 titles

Ever Is Over All poster
NR

Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene. –MoMA

Ever Is Over All

1997

I'm a Victim of This Song poster
5.0

With I'm a Victim of this Song, Rist takes up the concept of the "cover" version, in which one performer does a version of another's song, and gives it her own twist. Starting with music from Chris Isaak's hit single Wicked Game, she adds her own sung and screamed versions of the lyrics, accompanied by effects-manipulated, diaristic video images. The result is an art-world "cover" of a popular artifact, with a woman's voice reinterpreting the male original, and a vivid illustration of the consumer's claim to own and interpret media images.

I'm a Victim of This Song

1995

Blutclip poster
1.0

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

Blutclip

1993

Mother Floor poster
NR

A constantly moving camera dives deep into Rist's mouth and pops out of her anus, only to whirl back up to her open mouth - giving you the sensation of being swallowed and expelled, swallowed and expelled, into infinity.

Mother Floor

1996

Aujourd'hui poster
NR

A daytime fantasy featuring earth nymphs, this short video work is an adapted version of Rist's installation "I Couldn't Agree With You More" for screening purposes, and to watch lying down on your left side or turning monitor 90 degrees.

Aujourd'hui

1999

You Called Me Jacky poster
NR

This video art work features Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist lip-synching to Kevin Coyne's 1973 song 'Jacky and Edna', her image superimposed with fleeting images seen from the window of a moving train.

You Called Me Jacky

1990

Series credits

Behind the camera

Pepperminta poster
5.8

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.

Pepperminta

2009

Pepperminta poster
5.8

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.

Pepperminta

2009

Stories on Human Rights poster
2.2

20 short films about human rights.

Stories on Human Rights

2008

Rainwoman (I Am Called a Plant) poster
NR

This sensual, slow-motion video installation shows the artist, with her shocking-pink hair, lying naked on the rain-soaked earth.

Rainwoman (I Am Called a Plant)

1999

Supersubjektiv poster
NR

Supersubjektiv traces Rist’s longing for connection in an increasingly digital and globalized world.

Supersubjektiv

2001

Lungenflügel poster
NR

Presented across three screens, Lungenflügel (Lobe of the Lung) 2009 is an immersive video installation, lasting just over fifteen minutes. It depicts a luxurious valley in which the two main characters, a naked woman and a pig, wander. The human and the animal are put on the same plane, each appearing on one of the facing screenings, left and right of the central projection. The woman crawls on all fours, eating apples straight from the grass, in a choreography that very closely emulates the movements of the swine. As the work progresses, the footage becomes more abstract, filmed partly underwater in hues of vibrant red and partly in fields of brightly coloured tulips.

Lungenflügel

2009

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Osakabe Sayaka (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_D) poster
NR

Sight and sex viewed through a window.

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Osakabe Sayaka (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_D)

2020

Ever Is Over All poster
NR

Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene. –MoMA

Ever Is Over All

1997

Ever Is Over All poster
NR

Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene. –MoMA

Ever Is Over All

1997

I'm a Victim of This Song poster
5.0

With I'm a Victim of this Song, Rist takes up the concept of the "cover" version, in which one performer does a version of another's song, and gives it her own twist. Starting with music from Chris Isaak's hit single Wicked Game, she adds her own sung and screamed versions of the lyrics, accompanied by effects-manipulated, diaristic video images. The result is an art-world "cover" of a popular artifact, with a woman's voice reinterpreting the male original, and a vivid illustration of the consumer's claim to own and interpret media images.

I'm a Victim of This Song

1995

Blutclip poster
1.0

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

Blutclip

1993

Pixel Forest poster
NR

Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information.

Pixel Forest

2016

Lullaby poster
NR

‘It’s springtime’, a little bird stealing the filaments of my window screen reminded me this morning. ‘The sun in shining, the sky is blue, the trees are blossoming pink flowers and there is a wide world to be explored…what are you doing indoors?’ This 2002 video by artist Pipilotti Rist seems to be proposing a similar criticism in her reframing of concepts of time, season and the human lifespan.

Lullaby

2002

Mother Floor poster
NR

A constantly moving camera dives deep into Rist's mouth and pops out of her anus, only to whirl back up to her open mouth - giving you the sensation of being swallowed and expelled, swallowed and expelled, into infinity.

Mother Floor

1996

I Want to See How You See poster
NR

A lyrical tale of a witch's coven is played over images of a person where each body part symbolically represents an area of the world. Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist explores the macrocosm of humanity in this video, art and music combination.

I Want to See How You See

2003

Welling Color Island West poster
NR

A Persian carpet melts, dragon fly wings transform into wild leaves, we glide under giant poppies, a naked giant does yoga over us.

Welling Color Island West

2023

(Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes poster
6.0

Precisely edited to the start-stop rhythm of a martial beat and post-punk rock music, Absolutions glories in organized disjunction, juxtaposing images of the artist collapsing to the ground with bursts of wildly scrambled electronic distortion.

(Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes

1988

大皮膚 SKI-NY poster
NR

Metal textures flow into cellular structures.

大皮膚 SKI-NY

2022

Oasis Dance, Sipping My Desert--Santa Fe, New Mexico poster
NR

During the party offered for Halloween at the Nobel Laureate, Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe, Michele and Pipilotti enter a back room...

Oasis Dance, Sipping My Desert--Santa Fe, New Mexico

1998

I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much poster
3.9

This video work was made while Rist was still an art student at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. It was produced in an unlimited edition and is intended to be shown on a domestic-style monitor, although it may also be displayed as a projection with special permission from the artist. The video depicts the artist, an attractive young woman dancing manically around the room while repeatedly singing ‘I’m not the girl who misses much’. The phrase is an adaptation of the first line of the Beatles song ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun'. Referring to her childhood Rist has said, ‘In my village in Switzerland I had a small window on the art world through the mass media; through John Lennon/Yoko Ono I moved from pop music to contemporary art. In return, I will always be grateful to popular culture’ (quoted in ‘I rist, you rist, she rists, he rists, we rist, you rist, they rist, tourist: Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Pipilotti Rist’, Pipilotti Rist, p.16).

I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much

1986

Aujourd'hui poster
NR

A daytime fantasy featuring earth nymphs, this short video work is an adapted version of Rist's installation "I Couldn't Agree With You More" for screening purposes, and to watch lying down on your left side or turning monitor 90 degrees.

Aujourd'hui

1999

Aujourd'hui poster
NR

A daytime fantasy featuring earth nymphs, this short video work is an adapted version of Rist's installation "I Couldn't Agree With You More" for screening purposes, and to watch lying down on your left side or turning monitor 90 degrees.

Aujourd'hui

1999

Pickelporno poster
5.8

In this visual evocation of sex and sexuality, a man and woman stage an elaborately choreographed courtship ritual, edited with Rist's usual attention to the syntax of mass media. As a driving bass sample plays, a surveillance camera makes low-flying journeys across the bodies of the actors, yielding images at once familiar and distancing, a strategy in keeping with Rist's desire "to propose images of sexuality rather than to analyze the pros and the cons of pornography."

Pickelporno

1992

You Called Me Jacky poster
NR

This video art work features Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist lip-synching to Kevin Coyne's 1973 song 'Jacky and Edna', her image superimposed with fleeting images seen from the window of a moving train.

You Called Me Jacky

1990

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Amaranta Gómez Regalado (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_E) poster
NR

Life and fireworks seen through a window.

Peeping Freedom Shutters for Amaranta Gómez Regalado (Apollomat vertical screen PFS_E)

2020

Welling Color Island East poster
NR

Patterns swirl and melt, a woman falls backwards into a galaxy, a naked giant does yoga over us.

Welling Color Island East

2023

Sexy Sad I poster
1.0

In this détourned music video, Rist trains her camera on the nude male body, challenging the tropes of the form and of pop culture in general. Her anonymous male subject is more puppet than star player as he flails helplessly, chasing a receding camera, accompanied by a cut-and-paste remix of The Beatles' Sexy Sadie. Supersaturated colors and a woodland setting further serve to naturalize the surreal scenario.

Sexy Sad I

1987

Sexy Sad I poster
1.0

In this détourned music video, Rist trains her camera on the nude male body, challenging the tropes of the form and of pop culture in general. Her anonymous male subject is more puppet than star player as he flails helplessly, chasing a receding camera, accompanied by a cut-and-paste remix of The Beatles' Sexy Sadie. Supersaturated colors and a woodland setting further serve to naturalize the surreal scenario.

Sexy Sad I

1987

Sip My Ocean poster
NR

Sip My Ocean, a video projected as two mirrored reflections on adjoining walls, offers a kaleidoscopic view of an idyllic underwater paradise, with a flowing sequence of dreamlike images, including intermittent close-ups of a bikini-clad woman floating and swimming through the waves along with views of various domestic objects sinking to the seabed. The implicit voyeurism and exaggerated hyperfeminity of such images are complicated by the accompanying sound track, in which the artist’s rendition of Chris Isaac’s melancholy pop song Wicked Game is punctuated by her repeated shrieking of the lyrics “I don’t want to fall in love.” Although she denies having an explicitly feminist agenda, Rist frequently merges eroticism and coquettishness with aggression and hysteria to produce provocative fantasies of female empowerment.

Sip My Ocean

1996

No artwork available
NR

For her London exhibition, ‘Worry Will Vanish’, Rist has transformed the gallery into a fully immersive, sensory environment. Projected against two walls, ‘Worry Will Vanish Horizon’ (2014) is a journey inside the human body, based on a three-dimensional animation. Rist delights in patterns created by manipulating creases of skin, caressing, pushing and pulling to depict the varied textures of human flesh. These corporeal images periodically overlap with close-up fragments from nature as Rist blurs the boundaries between the self and organic structures. She explores the relationship between internal and external, how individuals are linked to the tissues and blood vessels of other organisms, and in so doing, she suggests relationships with the universe at large.

Worry Will Vanish Horizon

2014

Peeping Freedom Pavilion for Sojourner Truth (Apollomat horizontal screen PFP) poster
NR

Love, memory, nature, and intimacy collide.

Peeping Freedom Pavilion for Sojourner Truth (Apollomat horizontal screen PFP)

2020

When My Mother's Brother Was Born, It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossom in Front of the Brown-Burnt Sill poster
1.0

The video drifts between reason and dream and, like the installation, floats between earth and sky. Rist tries to give answers to such questions as ‘How much of what you see and hear comes from outside and how much is constructed by your brain? Why does your hair grow out of your head as if your skull was a cornfield?’.

When My Mother's Brother Was Born, It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossom in Front of the Brown-Burnt Sill

1992

Selfless in the Bath of Lava poster
NR

Selbstlos im Lavabad is comprised of a small film embedded in a hole on the floor. In the film, the artist swims nude in an incandescent lava bath and cries out “I am a worm and you are a flower!” This film was first exhibited in Basel, Switzerland, in 1994. [Overview Courtesy of MoMA PS1]

Selfless in the Bath of Lava

1994

Neighbors Without Fences (Apollomatmember) poster
NR

No bigger than ants, we glide through an Arcadian garden.

Neighbors Without Fences (Apollomatmember)

2023