Welcome to Pepperminta’s magic world

Swiss Pipilotti Rist first burst into the art scenes fifteen or so years ago.

A multi-talented artist, Rist took part in many exhibitions all over the world presenting unconventional video/audio works and installations.

Her latest exhibition ‘Elixir. Pipilotti Rist’, opens today at Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.

The event focuses on six audio/video installations that take the visitor through a journey into narrative and meditative soundscapes.

There is another important appointment for Rist’s fans today and that’s the international premiere of Rist's first feature film that opens tonight at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.

Pepperminta borrows a lot from Rist’s magic atmospheres and world. The film follows indeed the vicissitudes of heroine Pepperminta (Ewelina Guzik) and her two friends Werwen (Sven Pippig) and Edna (Sabine Timoteo), who embark onto a journey to look for a more human world and free people from fear.

Fantasy, fun and irony are the main ingredients of this fable that is a crossover between Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie and Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstockings drenched in Fred Butler's colours on acid.

Pepperminta has an unhealthy obsession with strawberries, lives in a rainbow house similar to Pippi's Villa Villekulla surrounded by her pets and follows her own peculiar life rules.

She is a rascal and an anarchist with a golden heart who believes in humour
and imagination and the film could be considered as a sort of
extended version of Rist’s popular installations with a final
optimistic aim, bringing social change through positive energies.

There is also an interesting fashionable side to the film and that’s the brightly coloured Sgt. Pepper's uniforms Pepperminta & Co. wear.

In the past Rist compared her installations to handbags that could contain a bit of everything, from music and painting to poetry, sex and technology. This is exactly how Pepperminta could be defined, a sort of kaleidoscopically coloured universe in which everything is possible.

The film will be released in Switzerland on 10 September, but Swiss-residents may also want to visit Rist's exhibition at the Zürich-based Hauser & Wirth.

Rist has turned the ground floor galleries into her very special ‘living’ room in which walls, floors and furnishings are turned into live objects thanks to colourful installations that feature images shot during the making of Pepperminta.