Since the middle of the 1980s Pipilotti Rist (born 1962) has continuously explored, challenged and exploded the potentials, rules, conventions and limitations of a constantly evolving palette of video technologies.

In her works, video is not just video, but also painting and space. Her work is at one and the same time high-tech and sensual, radiantly colourful and critical, weightless and body-bound.

The exhibition ‘Åbn min lysning (Open My Glade)’ was the first major presentation of the artist’s work in Scandinavia and spanned the whole output of the artist’s oeuvre — from early works in the TV format to large spatial video and audio installations with projections on ceilings, walls and floors. The exhibition, created for Louisiana in close collaboration with the artist herself, took on the character of a site-specific immersive installation and continued out into the museum park.

The artist had wished to transform the museum into “a shared apartment where you can visit each other’s brains and bodies.” She stresses her firm belief in the fact that the museum “lifts us all into a common thought bubble” where we are able “to share knowledge, feelings, inner images and suggestions.”

Pipilotti Rist’s dizzyingly intimate gaze at the internal and external world often suffuses both body and mind as a sensory state. The artist’s name is a nod to the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s rebellious, freethinking, and colourful heroine Pippi Longstocking.

In her art the camera is both eye and sense of touch, and external and internal images merge in the often psychedelic, symbol-laden spaces that range from the sensually playful, witty and free to immersions into more oppressive, existential depths.

Pipilotti Rist has a very special relationship to the Louisiana Museum. In her words it is “a pioneering museum that creates and connects new worlds.” In this way the museum “offers images of hope and enthusiasm and it reassures us that we are not alone.” The museum has the potential of being a political and spiritual institute of inspiration and healing says the Swiss artist who in the first video featured above she gives us a very condensed presentation of herself and her way to Louisiana.

In 1996 Louisiana became the first institution to acquire one of the artist’s works for a museum collection. Besides this work, Sip My Ocean, 1996, the collection also includes what in the artist’s own words was her first ‘official’ artwork, the now iconic I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, 1986. In 2010 visitors could experience the large installation Homo Sapiens Sapiens, 2005, at the museum, where visitors would observe a large projection on the ceiling lying down on the floor.