-  We all come out from between our mother's legs. From there that we first see the light of the world.

Pipilotti Rist, birth name Elisabeth Rist, (b. 1962) is a Swiss artist who is a leading figure in video- and light installations. She was first known for her videoinstallation I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), but her breakthrough on international scale was in the middle of the 1990s with the video-installations Sip My Ocean (1996) and Ever is Over All (1997). As an artist she is known for making comprehensive, suprising andintruiging installations which combines video, light, sound and design. She is known for focusing on the human body, familiar and domestic motivs which she distorts and appropriate in new contexts. Nordic Hiplights is an extension of her artistic universe. Rist has taken the recognizable and everyday motif of a clothesline containing only white underwear for both sexes, and transformed it to a chain of light, following a forest path in the park. Each underwear is illuminated by their own light. By converting the underwear as lamps hanging high above us Rist highlights and elevates this intimate and very familiar clothing. It is first when the underpants are taken outside the private and safe sphere of our everyday lives we experience them as bizarre and astonishing. She explores in an shamelessly and humouristic way this important, and stigmatized, part of the human body, which is the centre of life and pleasure but also pain. The underwear is not supposed to seduce or decorate, but to be experienced in their practical and original state, as something functinal and as a everyday object, highlighed and elevated by the glow from the lamps they are mounted on. And in case you were wondering, yes, she got her name from her childhood heroine Pippi Longstocking.

Pipilotti Rist: Nordic Hiplights, 2022 ©️Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine / BONO 

Nordic Hiplights is made in collaboration with Sebastian Köpf & Andreas Lechthaler @ Klaud, Hobelsberger Studios, Tamara Rist, Dave Lang, Nike Dreyer, Anne Ciresa, Remo Weber, Raphaella Diener, Anna Caruso, James Koch, Neil Wenman & the whole Ekebergparken team

Foto: Kristina A. Kvåle / Ekebergparken