Pipilotti Rist

Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist (b.1962) creates colourful multi-screen video works which, often with the pace and seduction of a pop promo, signal the birth of a new interdisciplinary artform. With such lighthearted artworks as Ever Is Over All, showing a princess-like young girl blithely smashing car windows, Rist invents new possibilities for poetry, feminine identity and the traditional genre of portraiture. The highly accomplished technological skill reflected in her work since the late 1980s, incorporating in unprecedented ways the artforms of film, music, sculpture and performance, have established Rist among the world's best-known contemporary video artists.

American academic Peggy Phelan surveys the artist's work to date, investigating the psychoanalytic and feminist implication of the artist's increasingly complex video installations. Curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses with the artist her ideas of utopia: utopian art, utopian working structures, utopian museums. Swiss academic Elisabeth Bronfen examines one of Rist's earliest works, (Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes (1988), centring upon the phsychological aspects of the work. The artist has selected a short story by Richard Brautigan and a poem by Anne Sexton, both of which echo the dream-like quality of her own work. Pipilotti Rist's diverse texts range from a homage to 1960s video pioneer Nam June Paik to a previously unpublished text 'Monologue in Car (Suburb Brain)'.