Ever Is Over All
1997 · 4m · Switzerland
Directed by Pipilotti Rist
Genres: experimental
Tones: provocative, surreal, whimsical
A woman in a turquoise dress and red shoes joyfully walks down a street smashing car windows with a giant tropical flower, while an adjacent projection shows lush close-ups of blooming flowers—a dreamlike act of feminist liberation set to a hypnotic melody.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A woman in a turquoise dress smashing car windows with a giant flower in slow motion — Rist invented joy-vandalism and Beyoncé borrowed it twenty years later. Four minutes that earned their footprint.
Rist's two-channel video — the turquoise-dressed woman smashing windows with a tropical flower — earned its place in MoMA and arguably in Beyoncé's Lemonade. YouTube hosts it, though installation context inevitably gets flattened.
Two-channel video installation where slow-motion flower-as-baseball-bat smashing meets cheerful music - the formal innovation that Beyoncé's 'Hold Up' lifted wholesale two decades later. 2:45 on YouTube confirms the runtime; the joy of the cheerful vandalism is fully intact.
Reviews
Ever Is Over All manages to speak to feminism but also reaches well beyond it—it's perfectly open-ended. It's an unfinished sentence, and you can finish it however you need to.
Rist materializes inner anger into a visual narrative sequence, transfiguring the protagonist's seemingly aggressive, destructive act into a gesture of liberation.
Festivals
- Venice Biennale 1997, Premio 2000