MANNHEIM.- Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer of video art, acclaimed for her innovative installations. Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage is her first major public survey show, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, and bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist's practice fuses sensual images, music, and sometimes text to create mesmerising works. Opening 24 March and running until 24 June 2012 the exhibition transforms the museum and features new works including an audio-video installation and an outdoor light sculpture.

Rist creates films—playful, psychedelic, sensuous, and often provocative—exploring themes and imagery of birth and death; family and love; the body and the natural world. By exploring size and scale, high and low technology, the natural world and the urban environment, Rist invites her audience to question ways of seeing and experiencing art, and to constantly change their perspectives. The Kunsthalle Mannheim exhibition presents Rist's single screen videos and full-bleed large scale projections; monitors in a suspended bathing suit Digesting Impressions (1996); videos projected inside shells and handbags YOGHURT ON SKIN – VELVET ON TV (2009), and onto a chandelier made of underpants Massachusetts Chandelier (2010); onto a model of a suburban house Suburb Brain (1999); and directly onto the lap of a visitor Lap Lamp (2006).

Born in Switzerland in 1962, Pipilotti Rist studied Graphic Design and Photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, then Video at the School for Design in Basel. Rist's vocabulary of sensual images and sound, focusing heavily on her own body, articulates an open-ended vision of truth and identity. Her work is engaged in a dialogue with disrupted harmony, exposing the darker underbelly of her utopias and manipulating video to reveal her agenda. After winning the Premio 2000 Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1997, Rist has had solo shows at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal and the Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York City.