Pipilotti Rist
Swiss (Grabs, Switzerland, 1962)Stir Heart, Rinse Heart
Rist works primarily with video and sound installations. Throughout her career she has explored the relationship between real and imaginary space, investigating new ways to free video images from the "frame" of the monitor.
Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, a site-specific installation created especially for SFMOMA, combines multiple video projections with everyday disposable containers, and suggests a permeability of the boundaries we usually take for granted: between inside and outside, body and landscape, nature and culture.
In one set of projections, Rist skillfully blends the infinitely small with the very large by layering recordings of urban and mountainous vistas from her native Switzerland with footage of human viscera. The imagery of the body's interior was produced in collaboration with a team of doctors using endoscopic cameras, ultrasound, magnetic resonance, microscopes, and X-rays.
An adjacent space features video footage projected onto medical containers for fluids of all kinds. Various kinds of fruit are scattered about on the floor below, as if ritual offerings in some unknown rite. Shadowy figures in the video intermingle with the shadows cast by the containers as well as by visitors to the space.
The overall effect of translucency and layering functions as a metaphor for the increasingly complex fluidity of everyday life, where the difference between natural and human-made is frequently indecipherable, where reality is a sum of collective and individual histories, and where rational thinking blends with imagination.
Keywords
landscapes, human organs, mountains, roads, rivers, trees, montages, blood
From June 3, 2013, through early 2016, SFMOMA's building on Third Street in San Francisco will be temporarily closed for expansion construction. Selected artworks in our collection are included in a range of off-site exhibitions during this period. We regret that the remainder of the collection will not be available for study during this time.
In the meantime, we invite you to explore a wide selection of our collection online. Please note that the information presented online is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify artwork details.
This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.
