(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler

An insistent percussion rhythm accompanies the images of the Betacam SP video »(Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler« [(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s mistakes]. A woman in a red dress falls to the ground over and over again to the hard sound of drums and cymbals – sometimes on asphalt, sometimes on grass, or in the middle of a cornfield. She straightens up, only to hit the ground again shortly afterwards. Another scene shows her jumping into a swimming pool again and again, where she can hardly move because a hand is holding her by the hair and trying to push her under the water. In another sequence, the woman tries in vain to climb a fence before her strength fails her. In this way, Pipilotti Rist's scenarios trace the failures of the protagonist in a compassionate and at the same time alienating way. By staging this imperfection and defectiveness as a pleasurable failure, the Swiss video artist creates a field of tension in which the female body oscillates indissolubly between self-empowerment and the objectivity of the gaze. In the process, Rist makes use of streaky disturbance images, noise, and self-referential texts that pay homage to the experimental beginnings and manipulative abilities of early image production and video art. Through the condensing, superimposition, and distortion of the images, the spatial orientation as well as the interplay of trial and error, dream and reality begin to blur.