The MCA Chicago to Launch Single Work Exhibition “Pipilotti Rist: Supersubjektiv” February 22
The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s upcoming exhibition Pipilotti Rist: Supersubjektiv opens on February 22 and runs through September 14, 2025, in the Turner Gallery on the museum’s fourth floor. ‘
This exhibition focuses on a single artwork by Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland; lives in Zürich, Switzerland), the 2001 video installation Supersubjektiv. In the artwork, Rist takes digital surveillance footage she filmed during a month-long trip to Japan and morphs it into a dream-like space for contemplation and curiosity, pairing the hallucinatory video with an artist-made pillow and sheepskin seating. The artwork examines nature, the built environment, and technology with wide-eyed wonder. While viewing the large-scale, wall-to-wall video, visitors are encouraged to relax in the darkened gallery and listen to its ambient electronic soundtrack, made in collaboration with composer Anders Guggisberg and featuring the familiar sounds of a dial-up internet modem as well as lyrics written and sung by Rist. Made at the turn of the millennium, Supersubjektiv traces Rist’s longing for connection in an increasingly digital and globalized world.
Supersubjektiv is part of the D.Daskalopoulos Collection Gift, which was jointly donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2022. Pipilotti Rist: Supersubjektiv is curated by Jason Foumberg, Daskalopoulos Collection Manager.
Swiss-born Pipilotti Rist used her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the first name of the Swedish children’s story character Pippi Longstocking to create her artistic moniker in 1982. She attended the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna from 1982 to 1986 and the Schule für Gestaltung Basel from 1986 to 1988. She produced her first video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), while still at school in Basel. In it, she bounces up and down, falling out of her dress, as she repeatedly sings the title line (derived from the lyrics to a Beatles song). From 1988 to 1994, she played in a rock band called Les Reines Prochaines, at the same time developing an aesthetic language quite close to that of music videos in her art. The artist appears in many of her own videos and often sings on the soundtracks; her mother, brother, and three sisters frequently assist in production. Rist has also developed installations such as Flying Room (1995) and Himalaya’s Sister’s Living Room (2000), in which video cameras and monitors are wittily deployed in furnished gallery spaces.
Since Rist’s first solo exhibition, in 1984, she has had shows at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (1995), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1996), SITE Santa Fe (1998), Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (2000), and Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008), among other venues. Her work has also appeared in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999, and 2005), São Paulo Biennial (1995), Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, and International Triennial of Contemporary Art, Yokohama (2001). She was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998.
