Floating visions, vibrant, psychedelic colors, hypnotic soundtracks, sensuality and ethereality are some of the main ingredients in the world of Pipilotti Rist, which lies at the border between dreams and reality. Her luxuriant videos and multimedia installations explore human sexuality and media culture with a playful, provocative blend of fantasy and everyday life, with images in movement transforming familiar subjects, themes and places into fascinating kaleidoscopes.
 
For Pipilotti Rist, video images are a projection of desires and emotions, a new form of organic life that viewers can perceive not just with their eyes but with their bodies. Often hidden in unexpected places—toilets, liquor bottles, seashells and handbags—or projected onto evocative surfaces—church ceilings or giant television screens—her installations are explorations of the senses, all-enveloping experiences in which all physical and psychological distance from the viewer is abolished. In Rist’s visual journeys, viewers often find themselves in spaces with topsy-turvy proportions, reduced to Lilliputian scale before giant images that heighten the sensation of childhood memories of a pure world, where corporeality seems reconciled with rationality and where sensuality takes on an almost spiritual dimension, sometimes tinged with irony and melancholy.
 
The gateway into Pipilotti Rist’s work is our emotional side, the part of us that reacts involuntarily to external stimuli. This observation inspired the title for her show with the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Parasimpatico: with her usual sense of humor, Pipilotti Rist is referring to the division of the nervous system that governs the body’s involuntary functions, such as digestion, relaxation, rest and energy storage.
 
Like her previous installations, this project conceived for the former Cinema Manzoni combines old and new work, with the objective of transforming the former theater into a huge living creature, mingling cinema and television, hallucinations and high-definition images. In Parasimpatico, Pipilotti Rist wraps the sumptuously decorated spaces of the Manzoni—from the lobby to the grand staircase, and from the auditorium to the bar—in a new skin of images, an all-enveloping carousel of sound, light, and color that restores a joyous magic to what was once Milan’s most prestigious movie theater, in a final flutter of life before its definitive transformation. This exhibition by Pipilotti Rist will be a unique opportunity to see the spaces of the former Cinema Manzoni in their original beauty, after five years of closure.
 
Designed by architect Alziro Bergonzo and opened in 1950, the Cinema Manzoni is part of a stately edifice conceived to house shops and commercial venues on Via Manzoni, in the heart of Milan. With a surface area of over 5000 square meters, richly decorated and frescoed, an enormous 1400-seat auditorium, and showing only first-run films, the Manzoni immediately came to be seen as the most elegant movie theater in the city, and was used as a location for important films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Story of a Love Affair  (1950) and The Lady Without Camelias (1952). In 1955 it became the first movie theater in Italy, and the third in the world, to introduce Cinerama, an innovative three-screen panoramic projection system. These unique features made the Cinema Manzoni one of the most remarkable movie theaters in Milan and in the entire country for over fifty years, until it definitively closed on 25 September 2006.
 
With Parasimpatico, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi continues its nomadic exploration of Milan, rediscovering forgotten places and hidden treasures in the heart of the city and bringing them back to life through contemporary art. After major solo shows by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Darren Almond, Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Urs Fischer, Anri Sala, Paola Pivi, Martin Creed, Pawel Althamer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Tino Sehgal, Tacita Dean, and Paul McCarthy, the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi is now proud to present this new large-scale project by Pipilotti Rist, as part of the calendar of events organized throughout 2011 to celebrate the centennial of Trussardi Group.

Biography