| Type: | Exhibition | | Exhibition date: | 27/06/08 - 31/08/08 | | Description: | This exhibition marks a moment in FACT’s 2008 Human Futures: my world programme where one of the world’s most
celebrated contemporary artists considers the human condition – from a conspicuously female position. Directing
and often playing the lead in her own works, Pipilotti Rist turned to the do-it-yourself medium of video because of its
closeness and intimacy with the subject. At a significant juncture in the artist’s career, as she prepares for a departure
from the gallery to the big screen of cinema, this exhibition draws together a set of the prevailing concerns within the
artist’s work to date.
With a trademark sensual slickness, her work explores ideas of fearlessness, the body, nature and spirituality. In this
UK debut of Gravity Be My Friend, the final part of a series launched to great acclaim with a site-specific
installation in a church at the 51st Venice Bienniale, she turns to the age-old religious concern of a paradise lost,
equating a global consciousness of climate change with the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.
Merging her own childhood diminutive name Lotti to that of her hero Pippi Longstocking, Elisabeth Charlotte Rist embraced
the irreverence and exuberance of Astrid Lindgren’s fictional character as an alternative feminine model for
her own artistic practice. While Pippi Longstocking hangs out with pirates and does what she wants when she wants,
Pipilotti Rist plays innerbody music and pulls existential faces; seduces but keeps her distance. She uses the excessive
and the absurd to fracture any sense of moralising and her work carves out a space where anything is possible.
No act of subversion is so strong that it disrupts the whole – and yet her work is as disturbing as it is playful. | | Description Source: | FACT Programme Pipilotti Rist | | Description Source Date: | June 2008 |
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