Pipilotti Rist: Freeing the Wonderlight

Since the mid-1980s, Rist has continuously challenged the conventions of video. The camera, for the artist, allows one to glimpse large and miniscule perspectives—of an insect or a raindrop on a leaf. These moments of lucidity in Rist’s films often reiterate humans as a part of nature, and of the strange privileges of being human. Across a career spanning more than three decades, Rist’s work has continued to explore art as a sentient phenomenon in dialogue with nature and technology. The artist has projected on the ceiling of the Swiss Federal Office of Culture for the Venice Biennale, the pavement outside Centre Pompidou, and across countless museums such as MoMA and the New Museum in New York.

At the heart of ‘Åbn min lysning’ (Open my Glade)’ is an emphasis on the potential of the museum as a collective, imaginative force, able to release visitors from the confines of inner life. Rist says ‘a show by me is like a journey through a body, or a helter-skelter…. You not only encounter the works but you encounter the other watching the works.’ The artist has a belief in the museum as a platform to ‘lift us all into a common thought bubble’ where we are able ‘to share knowledge, feelings, inner images and suggestions’. Rist’s art is expansive, often finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and imaginative invention. Rist hopes Louisiana can undergo a domesticating transformation, a kind of ‘shared apartment where you can visit each other’s brains’. – ‘Åbn min lysning (Open my Glade)’ is open to visitors at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark through 22 September 2019.