This exhibition marks a moment in FACT’s 2008 Human Futures: my world programme where one of the world’s most
celebrated contemporary artists considers the human condition – from a conspicuously female position. Directing
and often playing the lead in her own works, Pipilotti Rist turned to the do-it-yourself medium of video because of its
closeness and intimacy with the subject. At a significant juncture in the artist’s career, as she prepares for a departure
from the gallery to the big screen of cinema, this exhibition draws together a set of the prevailing concerns within the
artist’s work to date.
With a trademark sensual slickness, her work explores ideas of fearlessness, the body, nature and spirituality. In this
UK debut of Gravity Be My Friend, the final part of a series launched to great acclaim with a site-specific
installation in a church at the 51st Venice Bienniale, she turns to the age-old religious concern of a paradise lost,
equating a global consciousness of climate change with the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.