Production year: 2004
Media and technique: video / audio installation as an instant temple, with 2 projectors, 2 players, 2 sound systems, 2 timers, plexiglass, moulded-in crystals, and mirror, located in the female and male bathrooms of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa - A tribute to SANAA
Size: H30×W30×D30cm
© Pipilotti RIST
Photo:SAIKI Taku
A bathroom is a place of cleansing that is indispensable to everyone. Pipilotti Rist has viewed the bathroom as a sacred place and installed in it an altar, 30 centimeters to a side, placing on the altar some crystals and an object modeled after the Museum. Onto this object she has projected a video that celebrates the conversion of food and drink within the body into blood, tears, and internal organs, accompanied by words of gratitude for bodily wastes. Bathed in music that blends Rist’s angelic voice with water sounds and the singing of birds, viewers feel as if they had entered a mysterious world instead of a common, everyday bathroom.
Born in Rheintal, Switzerland in 1962. Lives in Zurich, Switzerland. Pipilotti Rist creates highly individualistic works, drawing on her command of several expressive fields, including graphic design, photography, video, and animation, and her experience playing in a rock band. Her work features extreme close-ups of parts of the body, often deliberately at angles producing distortion and discomforting the viewer, or else portrayal of radical or comical behavior, which she fuses with Pop-like flowing, color-infused music and video. Although her works combine grotesqueness and incongruity to jarring effect, Rist views people with a compassionate eye.