Pipilotti Rist: Midnight Screenings

For the past five years, the Times Square Advertising Coalition have been collaborating with Times Square Arts to produce an inspiring and captivating nightly light show across the electronic billboards. Every night at 11.57pm all the billboards are taken over by Midnight Moment – a screening of innovative and contemporary performance and visual art, showcasing new talent each month, opening the public eye to different styles and encouraging the discovery of new cultural events.

Throughout January, Pipilotti Rist’s Open My Glade (Flatten) 2000-2017 is mounted across 60 synchronised electronic billboards, using a new multi-channel edition of the work originally commissioned by the Public Art Fund in 2002. Formerly shown on a single screen, the current version surround the plazas, attracting attention with vivid imagery and bold, kaleidoscopic colours.

Challenging the ways in which technology and media frame the human body, Rist flattens her face against the glass screens, as if trying to break through them, communicating the notion of transgression and non-conformity.

This one month installation marks the end of Rist’s record-breaking exhibition, Pixel Forest which has been on display at the New Museum since October. Occupying the three main floors of the museum, and including a range of work from the artist’s early career that investigates the representation of the female body, the event moved through to her more recent video installations that transform spaces into surreal dreamlike environments.

From cinema and television to smartphones, immersive images and soundscapes, this presentation showcases how Rist’s work merges the electronic with the biological to create dialogues with her audience. The footage will be projected nightly onto the New Museum’s façade as part of the exhibition, as well as being screened during the Times Square takeover – linking the two in one final, celebratory closing event.

Pipilotti Rist: Open My Glade (Flatten) (2000–17) Times Square, New York. For more information, visit www.newmuseum.org

Credits:
1. Piplotti Rist, Pixel Forest. Exhibition view. 2016. Courtesy of New Museum and Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio.