© Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine / BONO. Photo: © Kristina A. Kvåle / Ekebergparken
Nordic Hip Lights
- Date 2021
- Unveiled 2022
- Material White men & female trousers, LED lights, wire
- Dimensions ca. 149 m
«From a distance they will look like whipped cream. (...) I hope they will make people smile but also think about the relationship we have with this important, sexually charged area in the middle of our bodies. We all come out from between our mother’s legs. It’s from there that we first see the light of the world.»
Photo: © Kristina A. Kvåle /Ekebergparken
Pipilotti Rist
(b. Grabs, Switzerland, 1962)
Pipilotti Rist, born Charlotte Elizabeth Rist, is a multimedia artist. She is most known for her explorative and provocative video installations, as well as her more recent light works. From 1982 to 1986, she studied commercial arts, illustration and photography at the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna. She then studied audio-visual communication and video at the School of Design in Basel, tutored by professor René Pulfer (1986-88). In 1986 she made a name for herself with the video work I’m not the girl who misses much, where a woman stands in front of the camera, alone, with a simple white background. The woman is captured out of focus. She dances and jumps as she repeatedly sings the title of the work. Her voice is warped to a high pitch and speed, creating a manic effect, which suddenly changes to a dark, sardonic ambience. Her early video installations were classic video works, shown on TV-monitors. With Sip My Ocean (1996), Rist departed from the restrictions of the monitors. In this work, she projected a kaleidoscopic film over two walls meeting in a corner. By utilizing the wall as a canvas where two standalone films met, Rist expanded the exhibition format of the video as art media. The video became part of a spatial and all-encompassing experience. Rist’s work has been exhibited across the globe, and she has received several awards for her extensive work with colour, sound and video. Such as the prestigious Sikkens Prize (2024), the Premio 2000 award (1997) for her achievements at the Venice Biennale, the Joan Miró Prize (2009), the Harper’s Bazaar China Art Price (2012), the Zurich Festival Prize (2013) and the Prix Meret Oppenheim (2014).
Nordic Hiplights is a site-specific light installation, placed in the Ekeberg forest. In a trail of trees, 60 white panties are hung above our heads. The panties, attached to steel wires mounted on the tree trunks, are illuminated in a dim white light from LED lights fastened in the pantyliner.
With Nordic Hiplights Rist explores and thematises the physical and the intimate in an unabashed and humorous manner. The panties on display are all rather practical undergarments, chosen for function and comfort. The underwear is not displayed as something sexual or erotic; it is portrayed as an everyday object, made for use.
In her practice, Rist focuses on the human body, familiar and domestic motifs which she distorts and appropriate in new contexts. In Nordic Hiplights she has taken the motif of a clothesline and transformed it to a chain of light. By converting the underwear to lamps hanging high above us Rist highlights and elevates this intimate and very familiar piece of clothing. It is first when the underpants are taken from the private and safe sphere of our everyday lives that we experience them as bizarre and astonishing.
The instalment of Nordic Hiplights gives strong associations to clotheslines with laundry hung to dry. The artist refers to the phrase «don’t do your dirty laundry in public», which encourages each of us to keep the strenuous and unflattering parts of life to ourselves. With Nordic Hiplights Rist makes the laundry a public matter. She illuminates it, and hangs it high above our heads, leaving us bathed in the light from the laundry. When we look at the panties, they become a collective, resembling each other to the point where it is difficult to distinguish them based on the gender they are made for. In this way, the work emphasises what we humans have in common and invites us to carry the weight of the strenuous and the unflattering in life together, instead of being weighed down in solitude.
Other works by Pipilotti Rist in the collection
Guided tours
Experience Nordic Hip Lights and many of the other artworks in the collection with our art mediators. We offer guided tours for private groups all year round.