A woman in a pink dress rises from her chair and goes to the railing of the terrace. A beautiful landscape with lush green meadows, dark fir trees and a pale blue mountain range in the background unfolds before her eyes. Sound enters the scene the same moment: a dreamy, longing song underlaid with everyday noises. With her film I Want to See How You See, Pipilotti Rist created an ode to seeing and perception. In the song she sings about the desire to see the world through the eyes of others. The artist roams rooms with her camera, exploring bodies and clouding the boundaries between inside and outside aided by digital image processing. “Without respect for the technology, I ride toward the sun on the computer and mix the images just before and behind the eyelids with my brain’s tongue,” she once described it poetically.
Yet, I Want to See How You See is also an example of Rist’s collaborative artistic practice. She produced the film’s soundtrack with Anders Guggisberg, a fellow artist and musician with whom she has collaborated since 1995, and she dedicated the film to the Swiss art historian Cornelia Providoli, who not only appears as the work’s protagonist, but with whom she has also worked on a number of book projects.
I Want to See How You See was commissioned for Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image, a box of eleven DVDs containing films and interviews by and with eleven major artists (Francis Alÿs, David Claerbout, Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Pierre Huyghe, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, William Kentridge, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist and Anri Sala) representing different generations and cultural identities.
