Neighbors Without Fences

Intimate and expansive, Pipilotti Rist’s Neighbors Without Fences situates the viewer in a simulation of a shared "backyard" through a spatial and multisensory installation that brings the outside indoors. Rist’s environment features the exterior facades of domestic homes and the worn trappings of suburban life—the grill, the picnic table, the window box, the bicycle. Within this mise-en-scène the artist creates a dreamlike space full of kaleidoscopic light, sound, and color. Independent projections and videos embedded in building windows pan the topography of the human body and the natural landscape, abstracting these familiar elements into something strange.

Inspired in equal measure by the pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, the radical performances of Yoko Ono, and televised media culture, the Swiss-born Rist came to broad public attention in the late 1980s. Her brashly feminist and lushly colored single-channel video works explored the body, often her own, as well as the natural world. By the mid-1990s, Rist broke free of the television monitor to produce a range of large-scale video installations that pushed the medium into new directions and dimensions. More recently, her projects have expanded into immersive multimedia environments like this one, which fuses the biological and the technological, the internal and the external, the private and the social.