Having previously exhibited major solo shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris, and MoMA, New York, ‘Eyeball Massage’ is, remarkably, her first major public survey show in the UK. 30 videos, sculptures and installation works spanning her career are exhibited alongside her best-known piece, Ever Is Over All (1997). This is an audio video diptych comprising two endlessly looping, overlapping videos – one of a field of giant flowers and the other of a woman shattering car windows with a stem of a flower – that won her the Premio 2000 award for outstanding achievement at the Venice Biennale.

 

Rist’s work is also emotional. Though the cradle and shell – analogies for life and death heavily represented by sculptures throughout the exhibition – are a little cliché, Rist provokes conversation around fertility, birth, and therefore the certainty of death. An obsession with the womb is also evident. Every pod, projection and sculpture demands an intimacy from its viewer, either by having to peer into it or sit among its den of bodily or oceanic debris. Adding to this is the fact that the entire exhibition is blacked out and emanates a hum of muffled noises from its various works. Projections are also invariably accompanied by cushions that invite the viewer to lie down for their infinite (looped) duration, which makes for a total sensory experience, with an almost telescopic and certainly disorientating perspective.

 

Rist’s films are branded as feminist because their female protagonist often subverts the idea of sex or sensuality. My favourite example of this is Selfless In The Bath Of Lava (1994), a frantic, naked woman drowning in a pool of seductive lava beseeching the audience from a tiny hole in the floor. The scale of this woman makes her appear pathetic but her pleas are powerful and make it hard to walk away from her without a pang of guilt.

 

‘Eyeball Massage’ is an attack on your senses and, whether you find the work dated, garish or magnetic, you will have a reaction. The Hayward has staged Rist’s oeuvre in a way that asks her audience to question new ways of experiencing and, particularly, seeing – perhaps the inspiration for the title of the exhibition.

 

 

PIPILOTTI RIST: Eyeball Massage is on at theHayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, until 8 January 2012.

 

Image credit: Installation view at the Hayward Gallery. Lobe Of The Lung (2009) by Pipilotti Rist. Photo Linda Nylind

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