BEIJING — UCCA Center for Contemporary Art is presenting Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe from July 19 to October 19, 2025. The exhibition marks a major commission by the pioneering Swiss artist, whose video-based installations have defined new modes of spatial and sensorial engagement since the 1980s.
Curated by Yan Fang, the exhibition anchors itself around the newly commissioned Your Palm is My Universe (2025), Rist’s most ambitious installation to date at UCCA. Spanning 1,800 square meters of the museum’s Great Hall, it is the largest single work the institution has commissioned since its founding. The installation is accompanied by a layered sound composition from experimental multi-instrumentalist Surma (Débora Umbelino). Together, image and sound form a multidimensional environment that situates visitors inside Rist’s evolving inquiry into perception, embodiment, and ecology.
The Great Hall as Living Body
At the center of the exhibition, Rist transforms UCCA’s Great Hall into a symbolic body. She deploys draped, translucent fabrics as projection surfaces that function like skin—porous, tactile, and open to touch. Videos move across the surfaces in saturated loops: close-ups of hands, feet, and faces shift into landscapes and back again, collapsing the distance between human anatomy and natural terrain.
The work deliberately unsettles orientation. Images play across uneven folds, recalling the way human eyes invert visual information before the brain corrects it.
Visitors are encouraged to lift and move the fabric, shaping their own experience while altering the perspectives of others nearby. This emphasis on collective perception dismantles the passivity often associated with screen-based culture, reframing the gallery as a shared sensory field.
Ecological Systems and Everyday Materials
While the installation immerses audiences in bodily sensation, it also reaches outward toward ecological reflection. Palm lines resemble topographic maps; close-up shots of leaves dissolve into vast fields. Rist positions the human body not as separate from the environment but as one element within a reciprocal system of organisms and habitats.
Other works extend this ecological and material focus. The Innocent Collection (1985–c.2054), installed along UCCA’s street-facing glass façade, assembles discarded translucent packaging into a sculptural constellation of “instant diamonds.” The piece underscores how overlooked materials can be reactivated through attention, turning waste into a site of perception. In the Open Gallery, Spring Chaoyang Chandelier (2025) strings pink swimsuits into a fountain-like chandelier, while Heaven on Earth (2025) saturates walls with radiant color fields layered with a poem by Rist and a curatorial preface. These works extend her ongoing play with intimacy, public space, and material transformation—where humor and sensuality destabilize familiar codes.
From Early Experiments to Expansive Installations
The exhibition also situates Rist’s new commissions alongside her early single-channel videos, screened weekly in the UCCA Auditorium. Works such as I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) and (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler (1988) remix pop culture and feminist critique through glitch, distortion, and repetition. These early experiments reveal the foundation of her later practice: treating the moving image not as passive representation but as a tool for unsettling identity and perception.
By juxtaposing these early tapes with monumental immersive environments, the exhibition demonstrates the continuity of Rist’s project. Her installations have grown in scale, yet their conceptual drive remains consistent: collapsing the screen-viewer divide, engaging the body, and reconfiguring the boundaries between technology, nature, and self.
About the Artist
Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland) is one of the most influential video and installation artists working today. Since the mid-1980s, her work has been exhibited globally, from the New Museum in New York to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Recent solo shows include Electric Idyll (Doha, 2024), Behind Your Eyelid (Hong Kong, 2022), and Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor (Los Angeles, 2021–2022). She lives and works in Zurich.
Exhibition Details
Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing
July 19 – October 19, 2025
