Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is internationally renowned as one of the pioneers of video art. Under the title Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain (a line from an early song by the artist and Anders Guggisberg), the Kunsthaus Zürich presents a retrospective exhibition of work by Pipilotti Rist, dating from 1986 to the present day.

The exhibition features historic key works as well as completely new works that have been created especially for the Kunsthaus. The show is conceived as a unified installation in which connections between different groups of work become evident. In the middle of the huge exhibition space, Pipilotti Rist has established a kind of collective home, bringing together around two dozen object assemblages and video sculptures from the last two decades. In the last third of the hall three video works from the 1990s are presented as large-scale projections, together with the brand new work Pixelwald (Pixelforest).

In this video, we have a look at the exhibition on the occasion of the press preview and the opening reception. We also sit down with the curator of the exhibition, Mirjam Varadinis, who provides us with an introduction to Pipilotti Rist’s work, and talks about the concept of the show, and specific works such as the artist’s new work Pixelwald. The video above is an excerpt, please scroll down for the the full-length version.

Pipilotti Rist: Dein Speichel ist mein Taucheranzug im Ozean des Schmerzes (Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain). Retrospective at Kunsthaus Zürich. Press preview and Vernissage, February 25, 2016.

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Complete video (13:02 min.):