RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Tiravanija, a native of Thailand, came of age as an artist in the volatile and destabilized world of New York in the late 80s and early 90s. His first works and exhibitions upended everythingwe as viewers and ‘consumers’ of art held as being stable truth and reality.

Today, 30 years later, the world around art and culture, indeed the world itself, has transformed in profound and fundamental ways. Our world and our relations to each other arebreaking. Art itself is in peril as a site of autonomy and freedom, hitched to capital like ahermit on a leash in the hands of the emperor.

As an artist, is there any real possible response or resistance to things as they now are? To this ever-degrading husk of human and natural condition? None. Nada. Zilch. We havepainted ourselves into a corner and our hand has been replaced by a new other. A new faceis in the mirror. A face without history. It does not age and it does not bleed.

Tiravanija, a floating, trans-national 21st century hermit, happily cedes the ground to this new unsleeping CREATIVE. He retreats and surrenders all, leaving one crucial message behind ashe exits stage right.

Solo exhibitions include the ICA London (permanent installation), Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. (2019), the National Gallery of Singapore(2018); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art,Moscow (2015), the Kunsthalle Bielefeld (2010), the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel(2009), the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Guggenheim Museum, New York;the Serpentine Gallery in London (2005), as well as the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen inRotterdam (2004). Tiravanija’s work has been recognized with numerous awards and grantsincluding the 2010 Absolut Art Award, the 2004 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by theGuggenheim Museum, and the 2003 Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia ArtistAward.

Tiravanija lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator ofUtopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is alsoPresident of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located inChiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER in Bangkok.