Rirkrit Tiravanija

Biography

In 1992, at 303 Gallery in New York, everything that stood in the office was carried out and a homemade kitchen was set up in its place: a refrigerator, a stove, tables, stools. The artist cooked Thai curry, and anyone who wished could come and eat for free. There was nothing to look at except the food and the people around it.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born on 21 July 1961 in Buenos Aires; his father was a Thai diplomat and his mother worked as an oral surgeon. He grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. In Ethiopia he learned English at an international school, and in Thailand he attended a Catholic school; his grandmother ran a garden restaurant there. He first studied history at Carleton University, then moved to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto (1980–84), and went on to study at the Banff Center School of Fine Arts (1984), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1984–86) and the Whitney Independent Studies Program in New York (1985–86). He had already moved to Manhattan in 1982.

His early reputation rested on a series begun in 1990 with the work pad thai at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York: he gave up conventional art objects and simply cooked for the audience. He later retitled this work “Untitled (free/still)”; it was recreated in 2007 at David Zwirner Gallery, and in 1995 a similar piece, with wall text giving instructions for cooking green curry, was shown at the Carnegie International. In 2012, at the Grand Palais, he staged a twelve-hour banquet built around a single dish, tom kha soup (Soup/No Soup). In 2015, with Gavin Brown, he opened Unclebrother, a restaurant and gallery in a former car dealership in Hancock, New York.

A second line of work concerns living spaces. In 1999, at Gavin Brown’s gallery, he built a full-size replica of his apartment, with a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom; it was open around the clock, and students really did live in it for the length of the show. Copies of the apartment were shown at the Liverpool Biennial in 2002 and at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2005. At other times he did the opposite and bricked up the entrance to a gallery for the duration of an exhibition. On a wall he wrote “Ne Travaillez Jamais”, a slogan of the Paris protests of May 1968. His objects are most often multiples and ephemera connected with exhibitions: backpacks, cooking utensils, maps. In 1997 he installed in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York a child-size version of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Later he turned to other architecture: Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House, a pavilion by Jean Prouvé, and Le Corbusier’s barge Asile Flottant, of which he built a version in 2010 in Chiang Mai.

In 2004 the Guggenheim Museum in New York awarded him the Hugo Boss Prize and presented an exhibition of his work, more political in tone. It included the installation Untitled 2005 (The Air Between the Chain-Link Fence and the Broken Bicycle Wheel): inside the museum he set up a low-power pirate television station with a simple antenna, put the text of the First Amendment to the US Constitution and instructions for building such equipment on the walls, and broadcast the film Punishment Park (1971). In 2019 the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington showed his exhibition (who’s afraid of red, yellow, and green): the galleries became a communal dining room, local artists painted a mural together, and the colours of the curry referred to the colours worn by factions in recent protests in Thailand.

His other projects include co-curating Station Utopia at the 2003 Venice Biennale with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit; a large picture, “Fear Eats the Soul” (176 square metres), for the safety curtain of the Vienna State Opera in the 2006/2007 season; and the opera Il Tempo del postino, staged with Obrist and Philippe Parreno (Manchester, 2007; Basel, 2009). In film he made Chew the Fat (2008), portraits of twelve artists of his generation, and the documentary Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours (2011), about an elderly farmer in a village near Chiang Mai, shown in Venice. The film Stories are Propaganda, made with Parreno, was seen at the Lyon Biennale in 2005.

In 1998, with the Thai artist Kamin Lerdchaiprasert, he founded The Land Foundation in the village of Sanpathong, about twenty kilometres from Chiang Mai: six hectares of land where artists and residents grow rice, build sustainable houses and use solar power. His main studio and home are in Chiang Mai, and he also works in New York and Berlin. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. The curator Nicolas Bourriaud has cited his work as exemplary of relational art. Claire Bishop objected that the emancipatory claims made for this practice are exaggerated and that the artist is too ubiquitous on the international scene. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1994), the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award (2003) and the Hugo Boss Prize (2004). His works are held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, Tate, the Centre Pompidou and many other collections.