Rist, who traditionally works in film, began her career by making super 8 films. Her works usually last only a few minutes and vary in color, sound and speed. Often her pieces approach issues like sexuality, gender and the human body. Her films often feel like digital space travel soaring through a colored injected world of leaves, flowers, stones, etc that transform into the crook of an elbow or a patch of hair. Her videos never rest, with digital technology, the perspective is always twisting and changing. Often, the videos are projected in a non tradtional way; spinning images floating on the floor, a hanging shiny metal drop with the video projected on its side.
A signature work of hers is housed in PS1 MoMA’s floor, through a tiny chink in the floorboards one hears the high pitched voice of a minpin screaming for help. Looking down into the floor, one sees a tiny video of the artist, filmed from a downward perspective, of her desperately jumping up and down trying to escape the floorboards. The effect is that there is a tiny Rist that has slipped between the cracks of the museum.
She is at the forefront of women artists and of video artists, both minorities in a world dominated by male painters/sculptors.
She has received a number of awards and prizes, including the Swiss Federal Arts Scholarship in 1991 and the prestigious Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis in 1999.