Pipilotti Rist

Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist is the first comprehensive U.S. survey of the seminal work of the Swiss video artist. Organized by curator Paola Morsiani, the project brings together Rist’s most significant work from the mid-1980s to the present.

Wishing for Synchronicity: Works by Pipilotti Rist includes eight of Rist’s early single-channel videos, six large wall projections, and one video installation with a monitor. The exhibition will feature a selection of significant works spanning her career, such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and Sip My Ocean (1996), in which pleasurable images and music quickly become metaphors for hysteria and suffocation, and Ever is Overall (1997), in which the camera follows a female walking through city streets, smashing car windows with an iron flower as she meanders. Through multiple video projections, unconventional viewpoints and close-ups, and large-scale installations that envelop the viewer, Rist’s work dissolves the conventional boundaries between artist and audience.

For more than twenty years, Rist has focused on the idea of the female self. By contextualizing the female body in all its sensory and biological functions, and by layering references to woman, body, and landscape in her work, her installations merge feelings of desire, sensuality and fantasy with feminist politics of identity and empowerment to create an intense emotional experience. This unprecedented examination of the development and significance of Rist’s oeuvre sheds new light on her influential and intensely personal fusion of art and visual culture, not only in her ubiquitous female characters, but also in her pioneering installations with image and sound media.

The exhibition is organized by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Curator Paola Morsiani and will be accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Morsiani and other scholars, as well as texts by the artist. It will also include extensive color reproductions, a comprehensive videography and list of Rist's video installations to date, and complete documentation on the artist ’s career.

Pressetext

Pipilotti Rist
Wishing for Synchronicity
Kurator: Paola Morsiani