Pipilotti Rist

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.

20 short films about human rights.

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.

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.

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).

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.

‘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.

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.