RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

Running from 8 April to 4 June 2023, the exhibition consists of 40 artworks in a compelling new series that explores themes of extinction, humankind’s destruction of the natural world, and our impending demise as a civilisation. Titled We don’t recognise what we don’t see, the show is a visceral experience provocatively designed to engage the mind and senses, conceived from works created during Tiravanija’s third residency with STPI (over a period from 2019 to 2023).

As the starting point of Tiravanija’s Extinction series, he appropriates paintings by the Old Masters to comment on how the Enlightenment exacerbated the nature-culture divide, with a thirst for science and knowledge reducing the agency and regard for non-human lifeforms in the natural ecology. He disrupts the narrative of these artworks by removing all traces of living creatures and screenprinted extinct or quasi-extinct animals with solar dust ink in their stead, visible only when ultraviolet light is shined on the artwork’s surface. In doing so, Tiravanija spotlights the disappearance of these animals, and how such historical reverberations and ways of seeing may have contributed to our “blindness” and disregard towards the extinction crisis.