Elixir: The Video Organism of Pipilotti Rist

Elixir: The Video Organism of Pipilotti Rist accompanied a large-scale survey of the Swiss artist's video installations, shown at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki in 2009. The title frames Rist's body of work as a living organism, an apt description for practice built from saturated color, immersive projection and the body as both subject and screen.

The catalog, designed by Irma Boom, brings together essays and documentation surveying installations from across Rist's career, with contributions from curator Sjarel Ex and writer Paul Kempers among others, situating the work within her ongoing exploration of intimacy, the domestic and the natural world refracted through video.

Rist (born 1962) has been a defining figure in video art since the 1980s, pioneering immersive, room-scale installations — from Pickelporno to Pour Your Body Out at MoMA — that dissolve the boundary between screen and viewer. Elixir remains one of the fullest institutional surveys of that practice.