Pipilotti Rist: Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, 2004

Pipilotti Rist (1962) plunges the spectator into an array of fragmented projections by sweeping her camera between her body and its immediate environment, by mixing up outside and inside, by drifting between physiological secretions and volcanic eruptions, microscopic and macroscopic landscapes. Alternately giant and miniscule and floating in a preverbal modern world which presents itself in terms of image, the body of the viewer penetrates the environment created by the artist while, at the same time, being penetrated by her universe. Rist’s installation presents an immersion that is more sensual than cerebral, but which nonetheless gives rise to a consideration of the contemporary body, drowned in the fluctuations of a daily life in which the difference between nature and artifice becomes less and less apparent.