Pipilotti Rist on Her Iconic Work 'Ever Is Over All' (1997) #contemporaryart #art
•March 9, 2026
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Why It Matters
The work illustrates how confronting editorial censorship can generate powerful feminist visual language, influencing contemporary video art and broader cultural dialogues about agency.
Key Takeaways
- •Rejection by newspaper editor sparked creation of "Ever Is Over All".
- •Rist used aggression as catalyst for hopeful, transformative artwork.
- •Collaboration with Silana Chesky kept performance seemingly ordinary, not violent.
- •The piece reflects personal catharsis through destructive yet uplifting gestures.
- •"Ever Is Over All" remains emblematic of feminist resistance in video art.
Summary
The video features Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist discussing her 1997 work "Ever Is Over All," an iconic looping video of a woman smashing windows with a flower.
Rist recounts that the idea emerged from a fraught encounter with a newspaper editor who rejected her proposed cover featuring an elderly woman, demanding a change. The confrontation triggered a “weak moment” that she transformed into a deliberate act of aggression—symbolized by the smashing of a car—in order to flip the narrative into optimism.
She notes that collaborator Silana Chesky performed the gesture in a matter‑of‑daily‑life manner, stripping the act of overt violence. Rist describes the process as a personal catharsis, turning destructive energy into a hopeful visual anthem.
The story underscores how resistance to institutional gatekeeping can fuel groundbreaking art, cementing the work’s status as a feminist statement about reclaiming agency through playful subversion.
Original Description
Pipilotti Rist works with video, film, and moving images. Her video work ‘Ever Is Over All’ (1997) has received the Premio 2000 award at the Venice Biennial. The work has been said to have inspired Beyoncé in her 2016 music video for the song 'Hold Up'.
Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962 as Elisabeth Charlotte Rist) is a Swiss visual artist, who works with video, film and moving images, often displayed as projections. Among her most prevalent themes are gender, sexuality and the human body. In 1997 her work was featured in the Venice Biennial, where she was awarded a Premio 2000 award for the video ‘Ever Is Over All’. Other awards include the Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1999), the Joan Miró Prize (2009) and the Cutting the Edge Award at the 27th Annual Miami International Film Festival (2010). In 2000 her work ‘Open My Glade’ was commissioned by the New York Public Art Fund and was broadcast on the largest video screen in Times Square, New York. Rist has held solo exhibitions at MoMA in New York, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and Museo Nacional Centro de Are Reina Sofia in Madrid among others. Her works are a part of prominent museums worldwide including MoMA in New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk and Tate Modern in London.
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