ZURICH.- Collection on Display presents a work by the video artist Pipilotti Rist from the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst: Show a Leg (Raus aus den Federn) (2001), a sprawling installation composed of video sequences and colorful spotlights sweeping over panels of variously textured curtain fabric; in conjunction with the hypnotic soundtrack, they immerse the visitor in a dreamlike scenery. The protagonists of Show a Leg— as of many of Pipilotti Rist’s works—are strong female figures: conscious of their own vulnerability, they rebel against social and moral as well as self-imposed constraints and playfully savor their newfound self-determination.

Pipilotti Rist (b. Grabs, Switzerland, 1962) is widely regarded as a preeminent artist working with moving images. Since the 1980s, she has manipulated cameras, editing equipment, and pixels, adopting every new technology and honing devices such as fluid tracking shots, cross-fades, perspective shifts, and changes of pace for an unmistakable visual idiom. The female body has always occupied a central place in the artist’s work, which has broached questions of women’s representation and their roles in media and society, but also themes such as sexuality and gender difference. In buoyant images and almost en passant, Rist has shattered conventions and taboos governing the depiction of bodies. Playful and inventive like few artists before her, she released the moving image from its classic mode of presentation—the TV monitor or projection on a wall or movie screen—and cast it onto mundane objects, architectural elements, or semitransparent room dividers to encourage the spectators to keep moving through the exhibition space and sample unusual perspectives. Show a Leg (Raus aus den Federn) (2001), the installation in the collection of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, similarly jettisons the conventional spectator’s perspective for an immersive experience: accompanied by a melancholy and hypnotic soundtrack, multiple video projections and cones of colorful light glide over wide patchworks of curtain fabric that divide the large gallery into several smaller segments. The partly repetitive video sequences are reflected by the textile panels as well as the walls, floor, and ceiling, generating an inexhaustible variety of overlapping and proliferating images. The visitors find themselves plunged into a “moving poem,” as the artist puts it, that blurs the boundary between reality and the space of representation and collapses the distance between self and world.

Like many of Rist’s works, Show a Leg (Raus aus den Federn) interweaves diverse video fragments that do not add up to a univocal linear narrative thread. Short clips of burning monitors or a voyage through a (screensaver-style) starry sky are references to the medium of video itself; the limelight, meanwhile, is once again reserved for female protagonists who represent various role models and forms of personal expression. Her aim, the artist says, is to show wild and strong human beings; in her perspective, woman is the standard and man the aberration: see, for example, the two confident women strolling through a piece of urban wasteland and flaunting their brightly colored skirts in a sensuous act of defiance against the desolate surroundings. In two thematically related scenes, the protagonist is seen acting in settings where women were historically oppressed and forced into gender roles defined by men: in a bedroom and a doctor’s office. Both sequences star Rist herself—an explosive blend of artificial character and vulnerable self-exposure on the part of the artist—breaking out of a pose that, in light of the Christian iconographic tradition, brings a crucifixion to mind. With a fierce leap “into the void,” the artist seems to shake off restrictive patriarchal belief systems and sets of values and transcend unnecessary—in many instances, self-imposed— barriers to become the self-determined and fearless human being she seeks to portray in her works.

Pipilotti Rist’s work has been shown in numerous institutional solo shows, including, recently, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2017); the New Museum, New York (2016); Kunsthaus Zürich (2016); Kunsthalle Krems (2015); the Times Museum, Guangzhou (2013); the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2012); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2012); Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milano (2011); the Hayward Gallery, London (2011); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2011); Fundació Joan Miró & Centre Cultura Caixa Girona Fontana d’Or, Barcelona/Girona (2010); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008); and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2007).