Pipilotti Rist, Pixelwald Motherboard (Pixelforest Mutterplatte), 2016, installation view, Pipilotti Rist: Sip my Ocean, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2017, courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine. (photo: Ken Leanfore)
Ken Leanfore
MCA - Pipilotti Rist, Sparks of the Domesticated Synapses (photo: Jessica Maurer)
Jessica Maurer
MCA - Pipilotti Rist, 4th Floor to Mildness (photo Anna Kucera)
Anna Kucera
An Australian exhibition by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist has proven to be a major sell out. The show ‘Sip my Ocean’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney is a retrospective of Rist’s work, and its popularity has taken the museum by surprise.
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Born in England, I've lived in Switzerland since 1994. I trained as a graphic designer in Zurich between 1997 – 2002. More recently I have moved on to work as photo editor and joined the team at swissinfo.ch in March 2017.
Born in São Paulo, Brazil, editor at the Portuguese Dept. and responsible for swissinfo.ch Culture beat. Degrees in Film and Business & Economics, worked at Folha de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s leading dailies, before moving to Switzerland in 2000 as international correspondent for various Brazilian media. Based in Zurich, Simantob worked with print and digital media, international co-productions of documentary films, visual arts (3.a Bienal da Bahia; Johann Jacobs Museum/Zurique), and was guest lecturer on Transmedia Storytelling at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU – Camera Arts, 2013-17).
The exhibition has been so popular that it has pushed the museum to the limit of its capacity at times, with long queues of people forming to see the colourful exhibit.
Museum director, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, said that social media had played a large part in its success. Numerous visitors had come to the museum with photos of the exhibition they had found on Instagram and specifically asked to see artworks by Rist.
A decision by the museum to stage a selfie-free night has been seen as a clever PR stunt. Although the hashtag #PipilottiRist is estimated to have “reached over 4.1 million people” according to the museum, in the final weeks of the exhibition an after-hours “unplugged session” was offered, requiring visitors to switch off their phones.
The exhibition also offered a nude visiting evening which, while unusual was fitting with Rist’s artistic themes. The museum’s website described it as a chance to “experience the liberating effects of enjoying art in the nude”.
Macgregor said the museum had taken a risk in choosing Rist’s work as the Swiss artist was not well known among the wider public in Australia.
Instinctive and visceral, Rist’s work stems from a generation of TV, the emergence of new technology and the human condition. The exhibition spanned the Swiss artist’s work from her single-channel 1980’s videos to her large-scale audio-visual installations. The works took up the whole third floor of the prestigious venue.
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Swiss artist hosts Sydney museum’s most visited exhibition
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The director of the MCA, Elizabeth Macgregor was surprised at the overwhelming success of the Rist exhibition, the Swiss News Agency SDA reported on Sunday. Official statistics have not yet been released by the tourism authorities, but Macgregor estimates that there were roughly 20 to 30 % more visitors compared to any previous year since…
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Influenced by global economic and geopolitical insecurity, financiers have been looking to invest in the more stable art market. The worldwide art market is still relatively small compared to its financial counterpart, with an estimated value of €26 billion (SFr37.8 billion), according to the European Fine Art Foundation. Switzerland’s art market, with sales of €625…
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If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.