QM to open Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist art exhibition

Qatar Museums (QM) will open Electric Idyll – the first survey exhibition dedicated to renowned contemporary Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962) in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region — at the Fire Station: Artist in Residence in Doha on February 23.

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition opens as part of the special February gathering of Qatar Creates, the year-round national cultural movement that promotes and celebrates the diversity of cultural activities in Qatar and connects residents and global audiences with Qatar’s creative industries. The exhibition will remain on view through June 1, 2024.

Designed as a single, comprehensive installation spanning the more than 650-square-metre exhibition space of the Fire Station’s Garage Gallery, Electric Idyll presents a diverse collection of some of the artist’s most celebrated works combined with new participatory pieces created specifically for this exhibition.

Emerging in the 1990s as part of a generation of artists who explore the connections between technology, nature and the spectacle of omni-pervasive images in contemporary societies, Rist has been internationally celebrated for her video installations, which combine immersive projections and communal experiences of dreamlike contemplation.

For Electric Idyll, Rist develops the exhibition as a hypnotic diorama — an all-encompassing digital landscape comprising 14 works.

Surrounded by multicoloured textile wall prints and curtains, the exhibition is connected by a series of “electric islands,” as the artist describes them: interactive displays where the combination of video projections, pieces of furniture, carpets and domestic objects together create large “still lives” that can be engaged by the audience.

In these “living rooms” — spaces that are both alive and lived in — images are projected onto viewers, effectively turning them and every surface of the gallery into screens and carriers of images.

These and the other works on view in Electric Idyll continue Rist’s expansive research into the intersection of human senses and digital technologies, imagining a future in which the biological and the electronic meet in a new body electric.

Additional exhibition highlights include Shapeshifter Window. The exhibition is open from Saturday to Thursday: 9am to 7pm, and Friday: 1:30pm to 7pm.

For more information and ticketing, visit https://www.firestation.org.qa/.