Pipilotti Rist

Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist creates colourful multi-screen video works which, often with the pace and seduction of a pop promo, signal the birth of a new interdisciplinary art form. With such lighthearted artworks as Ever Is Over All presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale (which won Rist the Biennale's Premio 2000), showing a princess-like young girl blithely smashing car windows, Rist invents new possibilities for poetry, feminine identity and the traditional genre of portraiture. The highly accomplished technological skill reflected in her work since the late 1980s, incorporating in unprecedented ways the art forms of film, music, sculpture and performance, have established Rist among the world's best-known contemporary video artists. Critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses with Rist the collaborative nature of her work, from her college-day video experiments to her recent large-screen installation in New York's Times Square. In her Survey feminist theorist and critic Peggy Phelan looks at the many sources behind Rist's art, from other contemporary artists working with video, to Andy Warhol, MTV, Impressionist flower painting and Hollywood film. In her Focus, theorist Elisabeth Bronfen makes a psychoanalytical study of Rist's portrait of defeat and failure, the 1998 video (Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes. The subtle poetry of Rist's work is reflected in her two Artist's Choice selections, the poem Barefoot by Anne Sexton and a short story by Richard Brautigan, as well as in her dreamy diaristic Artist's Writings.

Peggy Phelan is among the world's best-known contemporary feminist theorists and has written extensively on contemporary visual arts and performance. She is Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London. He has been co-curator of such international biennials as Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam, 1996), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and the 2nd Guangzhou Biennale (2005). Currently Inviato Speciale of Domus magazine, Obrist has also edited more than sixty books, including Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews, Volume 1 (2003) and do it (2005).

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, she has also written articles in the areas of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and art. Her most recent publication is The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 1998).