Behind Your Eyelid—Pipilotti Rist

August 3–November 27, 2022

Behind Your Eyelid—Pipilotti Rist

Sensual and insightful, the works of the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist embrace viewers with colours, sounds, and moving images. As visitors walk around and lie down in her mesmerising installations of “organised light,” they will take pleasure in how she makes the familiar unfamiliar while pointing out the beautiful in unexpected places. All are invited to share in a collective experience of the imagination.

Behind Your Eyelid—Pipilotti Rist offers entry into the artist’s remarkable vision. Her fascination with the liminal—the screen, the skin, the membrane, the filter—and her method of breaking video out of the frame generate perceptual shifts and intellectual reconsiderations that open doors onto a wondrous world of inner vision full of beauty, whimsy, and possibility.

Throughout the exhibition, it is possible to catch glimpses of how the artist takes video from the screen into physical space. Images from behind our eyelids become visible—“pictures from the moments in our unconscious when we are half-awake, euphoric, nostalgic, or nervous.”

Visitors will encounter immersive experiences and dreamy, lyrical ballads, early experimental videos as well as the latest site-specific works where the artist plays with the architecture of Tai Kwun itself. They might even be infected by the artist’s spirit of joyous rebelliousness. Rist strives to bring out “the hysterical sides of things” and not let “the positive sides be open only to the world of advertisement…Beauty doesn’t have to be corrupt.”

Prepare to share in the artist’s vision in which beauty playfully thwarts hardships from overwhelming us and brings forth alternative potentials of joy and empathy—here in the galleries and across Tai Kwun.

Artist: Pipilotti Rist
Curator: Tobias Berger
Presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary.