We are happy to inform you that the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, opened a major Pipilotti Rist exhibition, from April 6th to June 13th, 2021 in Kyoto, and subsequently from August 7th to October 17th, 2021 in Mito.
Pipilotti Rist: Your Eye Is My Island
Makiguchi Chinatsu(Curator, The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto)
“I want to see how you see. You want to see how I see. I want to show how I see. You want to show how you see.”
from (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes (1988)
The solo exhibition Pipilotti Rist: Your Eye Is My Island, opening on April 6, 2021, is the artist’s first solo exhibition at a Japanese museum in 13 years. The group show ‘Visions of the Body: Fashion or Invisible Corset’, is where Rist’s work appeared for the first time in Japan, which opened at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto exactly 22 years ago to the day. This exhibition featured ‘Ever is Over All’, which won the Premio 2000 award for emerging talents at the 1997 Venice Biennale, and ‘Sip My Ocean’, and Rist’s work left a vivid impression on the hearts and minds of people encountering it for the first time.
In Japan, since 2000 her works have appeared in solo exhibitions of CCA Kitakyushu (2000), Shiseido Gallery (2002), the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (2007), and the Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art (2008) and in the permanent collections of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004) and the extended loan display of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2010-2014); in group exhibitions including Yokohama Triennale (2001), the International Festival for Arts and Media Yokohama (2009), the Setouchi Triennale (2011), Visceral Sensation and Son et lumière (2013) at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture (2015), and the National Museum of Art, Osaka exhibition Travelers: Stepping Into the Unknown (2018). Through solo exhibitions, art festivals, group exhibitions and so forth, there have been many opportunities for joyful encounters between the Japan-friendly artist and Japanese art enthusiasts.
For the first time, Pipilotti Rist, together with her team and MoMAK, decided to carry out the installation entirely remotely because of the overseas travel restrictions. Please find some impressions of the installation:
The exhibition is accompanied by a beautiful catalogue (Japanese/English) which includes a Japanese translation of an interview with Pipilotti Rist by Calvin Tomkins, published in September 2020, as a biography that gives a picture of Pipilotti Rist as a person and her activities over the past 30 years. This a valuable long-form interview covering everything from Rist’s recollections of childhood in Switzerland and the more than three decades of her career thus far to her current mentality amid the coronavirus pandemic.
