Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss contemporary video artist. Best known for her vividly colorful work exploring the female body—namely her own—Rist’s work engages in lighthearted play, frequently combining a camera-specific aesthetic and technique with a message of social critique or commentary. “When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free,” she has explained. “In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within.” Born Elisabeth Charlotte on June 21, 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland, the artist studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, before studying video at the Schule für Gestaltung in Switzerland. Gaining acclaim for her work in the 1997 Venice Biennial, during which she received the Premio 2000 Prize, Rist continued her upward trajectory of international recognition, teaching at the University of California Los Angeles with Paul McCarthy in 2002–2003, and being awarded the Joan Miró Prize in 2009. She currently lives and works between Zurich and the mountains of Switzerland.

For Rist, showing vulnerability is a sign of strength on which she draws for inspiration. With her curious and lavish recordings of nature (to which humans belong as an animal), and her investigative editing, Rist seeks to justify the privileged position we are born with, simply by being human. Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention. ‘Pixel Forest’, 2016, made from 3,000 thousand LEDs hung on strings, resembles a movie screen that has exploded into the room, allowing viewers an immersive walk through 3-dimensional video. As she herself puts it, ‘beside the energy-intensive exploration of the geographical world, pictures, films and sounds have been and are the spaces into which we can escape… The projector is the flamethrower, the space is the vortex and you are the pearl within.’

Born Elizabeth Rist in 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland, Pipilotti Rist combined her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the first name of the Swedish children’s story character Pippi Longstocking to create her artistic moniker in 1982. She attended the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1982 to 1986 and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel from 1986 to 1988. She produced her first video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), while still at school in Basel. In it, she bounces up and down, falling out of her dress, as she repeatedly sings the title line (derived from the lyrics to a Beatles song). From 1988 to 1994, she played in a rock band called Les Reines Prochaines, at the same time developing an aesthetic language quite close to that of music videos in her art. The artist appears in many of her own videos and often sings on the soundtracks; her mother, brother, and three sisters frequently assist on the production. Rist has also developed installations such as Flying Room (1995) and Himalaya’s Sister’s Living Room (2000), in which video cameras and monitors are wittily deployed in furnished gallery spaces.