La Ribot
Born in 1962, lives and works in Geneva.
La Ribot is a choreographer, visual artist, and performer whose interdisciplinary practice challenges and redefines the conventions of dance, performance, and the body in motion. With a background in classical ballet and contemporary dance, she has developed a radical and singular artistic language that blurs the boundaries between stage and gallery, movement and object, presence and documentation.
At the heart of La Ribot’s work is the body — intimate, political, and persistently unruly. Her iconic series Distinguished Pieces, begun in the 1990s, pioneered a new form of “live art” that fuses performance with visual installation. Often performed solo and nude, these works unfold as ephemeral actions for both live and recorded audiences, challenging the gaze, disrupting expectations, and asserting the body as both subject and medium.
Her performances resist linear narrative and instead operate through fragments, repetitions, and spatial tension. Language, humor, and absurdity play key roles, allowing her to traverse themes ranging from gender and power to memory, violence, and the politics of visibility. Whether in a black-box theater or a white-cube gallery, La Ribot’s presence exerts a magnetic force — simultaneously vulnerable and commanding, minimal and explosive.
In parallel to her stage work, La Ribot has developed a significant body of video and installation pieces, often working in collaboration with other dancers, filmmakers, and institutions. These works extend her exploration of duration, embodiment, and spectatorship, and are frequently presented in museums and biennials alongside live performances.
La Ribot has been widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in European contemporary performance. She has presented her work at Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofía, and the Venice Biennale, and has received major awards including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Dance (2020).
Through her fearless approach and cross-disciplinary vision, La Ribot has reshaped the terrain of contemporary art and performance, insisting on the body as a site of pleasure, resistance, and transformation. Her work does not merely inhabit space — it insists on altering it.
