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RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA: MURDER AND MAYHEM


1301PE is pleased to present its fourth exhibition with Rirkrit Tiravanija entitled, MURDER AND MAYHEM. For more than 20 years, Tiravanija has consistently defied expectations of the form, and status of the work of art. He has upended cultural conventions of audience and its role, challenged ideas of the utility in the art object, and revealed the boundaries between art and life to be illusion. This exhibition continues the last exhibition at 1301PE entitled, DEMONSTRATION DRAWINGS, which featured over 100 drawings of images of current demonstrations taken from the International Herald Tribune. Tiravanija now uses many of these drawings in a new work, untitled (blueprint demonstrations). Produced by Maharam Digital Projects, Tiravanija has created a beautiful wallpaper which is both the background and the subject.

MURDER AND MAYHEM also continues Tiravanija's dialogue with artist Nico Dockx from their exhibition at Ver Gallery in Bangkok with a work entitled erasing 22'09" (unfinished). Created during the height of the unrest in Bangkok, erasing 22'09" (unfinished) focused on the organic nature of a shifting society and questions art presentation as a static and unalterable configuration in a time of great change. The constant relationship between creation and erasure is expressed through drawings and a vinyl recording.

In this exhibition, erasing22'09" (unfinished) with untitled (blueprint demonstrations) will create a powerful relation between foundation and destruction. History keeps repeating itself.

Born in 1961, Tiravanija is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld along with previous retrospective exhibition at the Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also President of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok-- where he maintains his primary residence and studio.