NEW YORK—A few things to know about Pipilotti Rist: She likes red beets, her favorite number is 54, and her real name is not Pipilotti. Born Elizabeth Charlotte, Rist adopted her artist moniker, Pipilotti, in 1982, when she combined her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the name of a favorite kids character, Pippi Longstocking. The allusion to the fictional young heroine is fitting for Rist; the Swiss video artist looks far younger than her 46 years and still has the exuberant and unaffected manner of a child.

Rist had her first solo exhibition in 1984, when she used painted cardboard to turn Vienna’s Galerie Prottore/Stauraum into a re-creation of a bank branch. But it was her first video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), that really set her path in the art world. In it she repeatedly sings the title line, an adaptation of a lyric from the Beatles song Happiness Is a Warm Gun, while dancing around in a black dress pulled down to expose her breasts. The female protagonist, nudity, and the central role of music are motifs that she has since continued to explore in her work.

Over the years, her practice has evolved from single-channel videos to multi-channel video installations to her latest project, a feature film due out next year. She has represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale twice — first in 1997, when she won the Premio 2000 award, and again in 2005; had solo shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, among others; and landed her work in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Aside from the feature film, Rist’s most recent project is Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), a large new video installation at the Museum of Modern Art, for which Rist has transformed the museum’s atrium by hanging pink curtains, laying down a carpet with concentric rings of color (meant to mimic the iris of an eye), and installing a couch-like seating structure. On three out of the room’s four walls, she will project images featuring what the museum calls a “lush, immersive landscape.”

ARTINFO sat down with Rist while she was installing the work, which opens Wednesday, November 19, and runs until February 2, 2009, to talk about the piece, the difference between nudity and sexuality, and the symbolism of flowers.

How does Pour Your Body Out differ from other installations you’ve done?

I once did a piece in the square in front of the Centre Pompidou, which was physically bigger, but in terms of video resolution, this is the biggest. Otherwise it is quite similar to other situations where I have adapted content to a room, but here it took us five years.

Five years — was that figuring out the subject matter and going back and forth with the museum?

Yes. When they first asked me to do something, I proposed making little holes in the walls and having landscapes behind them. Then they asked me to do something more symphonic. Then a couple of propositions were not possible because of security reasons or because of visitor flow, so I made new ones.

But I like it when a project takes a long time.

Why?

Different reasons. The institutions have to prove they trust me. Also, if something doesn’t happen, maybe it wasn’t worth it. Our times are too fast-paced anyway — we plan too quickly, and everything has to be built too quickly. One exposition I did, in my favorite museum, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, took 11 years. Also, the constraints and obstacles help you clarify. It’s like in architecture: When there are physical or financial constraints, they often help make things clearer and more logical.

You have to distill down and figure out what’s important and what works.

Yes, especially when you work in such big rooms. For this project, I built a model in the studio on a scale of one-to-three, but to actually create the installation takes more than three times the effort. Working in the room, the size explodes. Have you been there?