Pipilotti Rist - Eyeball massage
The Hayward Gallery, London
Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer of video art, acclaimed for her innovative installations. Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage is her first major public survey show in the UK, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, and bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music, and sometimes text to create mesmerising works. Opening 28 September and running until 8 January 2012 the exhibition will transform the gallery’s lower spaces and includes new works and an outdoor light installation.
Rist creates films – playful, psychedelic, sensuous, and often provocative – exploring themes and imagery of birth and death; family and love; the body and the natural world. By exploring size and scale, high and low technology, the natural world and the urban environment, Rist invites her audience to question ways of seeing and experiencing art, and to constantly change their perspectives. The Hayward exhibition presents Rist’s single screen videos and full-bleed large scale projections; monitors in a suspended bathing suit; videos projected inside shells and handbags, and onto a chandelier made of underpants; onto a model of a suburban house; and directly onto the lap of a visitor. Outside the galleries works will be shown in the Hayward Gallery Shop and projected onto the floor of one of the gallery toilets.
Exhibition highlights include:
Administrating Eternity (2011). The images were shot on location in the Swiss countryside and city suburbs. The film is projected onto a ‘forest’ of free hanging transparent curtains. As visitors wander through, they too catch the images and become the canvas for the projection, reflecting the artists enduring interest in creating a close relationship between work and spectator. In this space visitors can lounge on cushions made from stuffed trousers, shirts and jumpsuits, as if they were lying on and embracing other bodies.
Hiplights or Enlightened Hips (2011)
300 pairs of white underpants in various sizes are the basis of Hiplights or Enlightened Hips (2011) a new outdoor light sculpture created by Rist. Individually lit by circular LED lights, the glowing underpants will be suspended like laundry on a washing line along the riverside in front of the Royal Festival Hall and up towards the Hayward Gallery. The underpants have been provided by family, friends and the international charity, Caritas. Inside the gallery suspended from the ceiling in the centre of the room is Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), a huge luminous chandelier created from hundreds of underpants lit from the outside by projections of flowers, grass and sky.
Eyeball Massage is a huge undertaking by both the artist and the Hayward Gallery and is a must-see this autumn.
Pipilotti Rist - Eyeball massage
The Hayward Gallery, London
28 September – 17 October 2011
www.southbankcentre.co.uk