Pipilotti Rist. Worry will vanish revelation

Be seduced by the close-up, colour-saturated universe of Pipilotti Rist: remove your shoes and step inside an alternative space, recline on a soft cushion, give yourself permission to stop and stretch out. Allow your mind a reprieve from the day’s schedule, release your worry. Slow your breathing by relaxing each body part, starting with the soles of your feet right up to the top of your head. Absorb your new surrounds through your eyes and ears and try to sense your environment through every pore of your skin. Listen to the soundscape of a rhythmic, whirring pulse. As an entity who is now open to both supra and subliminal forces, give yourself over to the ‘moment of now’ where your physical boundaries start to dissolve and your mind is free to glide, tilt and flow. Accept the invitation to explore the sensation of being at one with the universe and every living organism in it.

As a master of the moving image with few comparisons, the Swiss born artist Pipilotti Rist is well known on the global contemporary art stage. Since the late 1980s the artist has carved a unique position within experimental video and film, making her name with works such as I’m not the girl who misses much 1986 and Pickle porno 1992. Over the course of her career, Rist has shown in numerous international biennales and held major solo exhibitions, including representing Switzerland at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, the commission of Open my glade for Times Square, New York in 2000, and the commission of Pour your body out, an enormous projected installation at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2008-09.

Worry will vanish revelation is the artist’s most recent large-scale moving image work. Over the last 15 years, Rist has moved from single-channel to multi-channel works, thus exponentially increasing the impact of her work on the audience through the creation of large-scale immersive environments that merge image, sound and scenario-specific props.

In the development of Worry will vanish revelation, Rist has adopted the lessons of ‘autogenic training’ – a set of physical exercises in combination with repeated visualisations – developed in the 1930s by psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz. With the invitation to lie down, Rist physically re-positions her viewer into a posture of relaxation, subsequently lulling them into a psychologically meditative state. The sequencing of hyper-visuals that follow take the viewer on a journey both inside the human body and traversing the skin; we fly like insects among the micro-cosmos of nature, and yet at other moments seem to be exploring the vastness of the universe. Rist’s offering is both visceral and psychological, and Worry will vanish revelation is a contemporary trip through the sensual and sublime.

Jaklyn Babington
Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Practice – Global