Pepperminta

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.

In this visual evocation of sex and sexuality, a man and woman stage an elaborately choreographed courtship ritual, edited with Rist's usual attention to the syntax of mass media. As a driving bass sample plays, a surveillance camera makes low-flying journeys across the bodies of the actors, yielding images at once familiar and distancing, a strategy in keeping with Rist's desire "to propose images of sexuality rather than to analyze the pros and the cons of pornography."

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.

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).

20 short films about human rights.

In this détourned music video, Rist trains her camera on the nude male body, challenging the tropes of the form and of pop culture in general. Her anonymous male subject is more puppet than star player as he flails helplessly, chasing a receding camera, accompanied by a cut-and-paste remix of The Beatles' Sexy Sadie. Supersaturated colors and a woodland setting further serve to naturalize the surreal scenario.

The video drifts between reason and dream and, like the installation, floats between earth and sky. Rist tries to give answers to such questions as ‘How much of what you see and hear comes from outside and how much is constructed by your brain? Why does your hair grow out of your head as if your skull was a cornfield?’.

During the party offered for Halloween at the Nobel Laureate, Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe, Michele and Pipilotti enter a back room...

A daytime fantasy featuring earth nymphs, this short video work is an adapted version of Rist's installation "I Couldn't Agree With You More" for screening purposes, and to watch lying down on your left side or turning monitor 90 degrees.

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.

A lyrical tale of a witch's coven is played over images of a person where each body part symbolically represents an area of the world. Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist explores the macrocosm of humanity in this video, art and music combination.

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.

Life and fireworks seen through a window.

Patterns swirl and melt, a woman falls backwards into a galaxy, a naked giant does yoga over us.

This video art work features Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist lip-synching to Kevin Coyne's 1973 song 'Jacky and Edna', her image superimposed with fleeting images seen from the window of a moving train.

This sensual, slow-motion video installation shows the artist, with her shocking-pink hair, lying naked on the rain-soaked earth.