Rirkrit Tiravanija to be included in the 2025 edition of the Singapore Biennale →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
September 15 | Singapore Biennale, Singapore Art Museum

Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark. Photo: Singapore Art Museum.

Singapore Biennale 2025: pure intention presents contemporary art in multiple venues and public spaces, inviting audiences of all walks of life to experience Singapore’s many layers built by all of those who have been a part of its history, collectively creating a city that is as planned as it is full of discovery, surprises and interesting juxtaposition. Curated by Duncan Bass, Hsu Fang-Tze, Ong Puay Khim, and Selene Yap, the Biennale offers Singaporeans an opportunity to reflect on the nation’s historic milestones and shared aspirations while imagining possible collective futures. The Biennale will engage with spaces ranging from pre-colonial and colonial landmarks transformed into public, green areas repurposed for recreation, residential neighbourhoods and lived spaces, to shopping centres that have evolved into social spaces for Singapore’s diverse communities.

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remains of the day: allora & calzadilla and rirkrit tiravanija at Kurimanzutto →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
September 4 – October 4, 2025 | Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

What lingers, what remains? When wars, environmental disasters, and political unraveling dominate the news, what stays with us after the headlines fade? Media coverage dissipates as surely as flowers fall and decay, yet events leave their mark, shaping what and how we remember. 

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s paintings layer charged phrases over pages from Mexican newspapers with once-urgent headlines. The works reveal how news structures memory, anchoring private and collective histories to particular dates. Newspapers from 2017 and 2024—years marked here by Trump’s first inauguration, California’s wildfires, and a solar eclipse spanning North America—show how time alters our perspective, depending on the political, environmental, or cosmic scale from which we view it. Across a series of canvases, the repeated phrase El miedo devora el alma (Fear Eats the Soul), borrowed from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, warns of fear’s corrosive power—its ability to weaken solidarity, erode empathy, and fracture recognition of our interdependence with each other and the natural world.

On the gallery floor, hundreds of blossoms—cast from the flowers of the African baobab tree (Adansonia digitata)—appear swept by the wind. In Graft (2023), Allora & Calzadilla fabricated each flower from recycled plastic and hand-painted it in one of seven stages of decay, ranging from freshly fallen white to withered brown. The baobab, long associated with resilience and ancestral survival in African communities, was introduced to the Indian subcontinent through trade networks and to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet even this long-lived species has been imperiled: in recent years, some of the world’s oldest and largest baobabs have perished due to drought and rising temperatures. Removed from their natural context, the flowers in the gallery evoke a fragile, paradoxical beauty shaped by histories of exploitation and enslavement, while pointing to the ecological precarity of the present and the uncertain future of a planet in crisis.

Amid scattered blossoms and newspapers, The Remains of the Day brings the fleeting and the lasting into dialogue, opening space to reflect on what remains—and what may slip away.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija and Philippe Parreno in Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010 →

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno
September 3 - December 8, 2025 | The National Art Center, Tokyo

Prism of the Real examines the practices of more than 50 artists from Japan and abroad. It explores both the art that emerged in Japan and how Japanese culture inspired the world between 1989, when the Shōwa era (1926–1989) ended and the Heisei era (1989–2019) began, and 2010.

These two decades saw the end of the Cold War and the advent of contemporary globalization, enabling the freer movement of people, goods, and information, and greatly encouraging international dialogue and engagement. Throughout this period, artists in Japan and elsewhere pursued new approaches, acting as prisms that refracted the social and cultural currents of the time into works that pose diverse questions. Co-curated by The National Art Center, Tokyo and M+, Hong Kong, this exhibition reflects on this critical transitional period through the lens of art. It presents a multifaceted view in which multiple histories and contexts coexist, while looking at Japan as a platform for artistic creation from both national and international perspectives.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija in All Stories Are About Us: A Climate Recipes Survey at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
August 9 – October 25, 2025 | Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, Panaji

Curated by Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi and Srinivas Mangipudi, All Stories Are About Us is the first comprehensive survey of the Climate Recipes project, which began within the corridors of Sunaparanta in the summer of 2023. From an exercise to gather wisdom in the Goan ecosystem, the project has evolved into a knowledge-system and dissemination method, extending across the regions of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha, Karnataka, and other parts of India, as well as the educational context of Ashoka University in Haryana.

All Stories Are About Us spatializes and activates some of the ideas and directions that emerge from the Climate Recipes project in conversation with artists and creative practitioners. These artists respond to and depart from the recipes to create new sensations of thought and action about the ongoing ecological crisis and the resilience of communities.

This show includes projects and interventions by Edible Archives, Salil Chaturvedi, Vikram Doctor, Tallulah D’Silva + Vishal Rawlley, Divesh Gadekar, Debasmita Ghosh, Mihika Kulkarni, Material Library of India, Enit María + Sartaj Ghuman, Kulpreet Singh, Sumeet Thakur, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ramesh V, Mamata Verlekar and Goa Water Stories.

The opening of the exhibition hosted a Climate Recipes Potluck conceptualized by renowned global contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija in collaboration with Edible Archives. This potluck was an immersive and durational experience centered around sharing food and the stories that accompany it.

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Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Artist Talk: Rirkrit Tiravanija - Making Without Objects →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

For several years now, renowned contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija has been teaching his students at Columbia College of the Arts in New York a course titled "Making Without Objects." According to Tiravanija, this undergraduate sculpture course does not teach students to produce anything. It is, for him, a way to explore how a young artist in an art school experiences what is happening in the world at large. Students, as part of the course, have made films for YouTube, done projects on Instagram, and Tiravanija even rented a plot in Second Life, inviting them to create sculptures virtually. He says, "I am more interested in encouraging my students to think conceptually and create things in their heads than in any material." This pedagogic approach is in close alignment with his multidimensional approach to art that emphasizes the conditions and relations art could potentially generate rather than an object-oriented outcome.

In this conversation, Rirkrit Tiravanija will discuss with Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi how his approach to art influences his teaching practice and vice versa.

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Charline Von Heyl and Rirkrit Tiravanija in Sky High Farm’s inaugural biennial, TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END →

Charline Von Heyl
June 29 - Fall, 2025 | Germantown, New York

Charline von Heyl, Black Flowers, (2023). Courtesy the artist and Sky High Farm 2025 Biennial.

Sky High Farm’s inaugural biennial, TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END, signals the start of a new chapter for the organization as it expands to a new 560-acre farm. Curated by the farm’s founder and board president, artist Dan Colen, and named after an artwork by its first staff member and farmer who passed away in 2014, the exhibition explores the connection between local ecology, history, and industry in the Hudson River Valley and their ties to New York City. Standouts include Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ billboard work Untitled (It’s Just a Matter of Time), installed on 24 billboards along the Hudson River from Troy to the New York Harbor; Anne Imhof’s industrial water containers that form a labyrinth, which holds other artists’s work; and Rudolf Stingel’s largest mirrored floor installation, serving as a pedestal for other works, including Pia Camil’s fountain made from joined dead apple trees that guides water into Imhof’s containers. Rooted in the farm’s community-centered mission to tackle issues like nutrition security and systemic injustice, the exhibition shows what can happen when art, agriculture, and activism come together, combining the transformative work of artists with the impact of a justice-oriented organization.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija in Homage: Queer Lineages on Video at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
June 27 - October 19, 2025 | The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University Lenfest Center of the Arts

Curated by Rattanamol Singh Johal, Homage: Queer Lineages on Video presents works by seven contemporary artists selected from the Akeroyd Collection who use moving images to pay tribute to cultural figures and histories that have been formative, if often (but not always) overlooked. 

The works in the exhibition, all made over the last two decades, explore how lens- and time-based media have enabled artists to articulate desiring and melancholic modes of relationality across generations. 

Intervening in commemorative genres of image making—including portraiture and documentary—through performative acts, selective appropriation, and imaginative staging, these works produce and problematize queer forms of kinship. 

Artists in the exhibition include Dineo Seshee Bopape, Tony Cokes, Carolyn Lazard, Kang Seung Lee, P. Staff, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

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Abraham Cruzvillegas, Danh Vo, Rirkrit Tiravanija at Galerie Chantal Crousel →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
June 13 - July 27, 2025 | Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Around La salle de jeux (1998), a historic and participatory piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Galerie Chantal Crousel presents a selection of works by Abraham Cruzvillegas and Danh Vo.

La salle de jeux (1998) by Rirkrit Tiravanija evokes a café or clubhouse—social settings where people meet to drink tea, watch television, play cards or share memories. A selection of games, DVDs and CDs is made available, and visitors are invited to take over the exhibition space as they wish. A corkboard, ready to receive any notes or drawings guests feel like posting, further encourages social exchange.

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Angela Bulloch, Jack Goldstein, & Rirkrit Tiravanija in Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound / The Ringier Collection 1995 – 2025, curated by Beatrix Ruf & Wade Guyton →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
April 13 – October 5, 2025 | The Langen Foundation, Neuss

In Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound the Langen Foundation in Neuss presents an extensive selection of works from the Swiss Ringier Collection, marking its first major exhibition in Germany. Curated by Beatrix Ruf and artist Wade Guyton, the exhibition features approximately 500 works, offering an overview of one of the most relevant collections of contemporary art. Spanning works from the late 1960s to the present day, it documents Michael Ringier’s 30 years as a collector and key developments in the art world.

Together, these pieces form a rich and layered portrait of Michael Ringier, a Swiss publisher and media entrepreneur, whose collection of art is deeply intertwined with his personal and professional life, as well as the identity of Ringier, a media company active in 19 countries across Europe and Africa. Since 1997, the company has invited international artists to design its annual reports, granting them complete creative freedom. These collaborations have resulted in creative and intelligent explorations of the role of a media publisher today and its engagement with audiences. Renowned artists including Fischli/Weiss, Maurizio Cattelan, and Sylvie Fleury have contributed to these reports, as has Wade Guyton, whose report featured a one-to-one reproduction of one of his paintings printed in high-resolution detail across hundreds of pages. When compiled, these pages recreate the work in its original dimensions.

The exhibition's subversive title highlights how traditional artistic media continues to inspire new interpretations—both by challenging their conventional boundaries and through intentional artistic ambiguity. Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Film, Video, Sound re-examines the expectations surrounding what defines a medium and how it shapes our perception. The connection to a global media company like Ringier is evident: from its beginnings in publishing and printing to its evolution into a digitized and diversified corporation, the company has been shaping the relationship between content and medium for over 190 years. Wade Guyton, too, challenges the concept of the medium of painting—whether through his large-format printed works or the strategic use of digital technologies, he questions what a medium can be and how it shapes the art it conveys.

Through these explorations, the exhibition invites viewers to see the collection not merely as a compilation of works but as a dynamic narrative that constantly opens up new perspectives. This approach reflects Michael Ringier’s view of art as a living, integral part of both his entrepreneurial and cultural engagement.

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Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija: "As an artist, I can only make signs."

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Louisiana Channel

“Paying attention now is actually a kind of political act."

Renowned Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija reflects on the role of art in a time of crisis, the importance of questioning authority, and the need for critical engagement with the world around us in repressive times.

For Tiravanija, art serves as a space of doubt and freedom: "Art is always a place where we can have doubt, we're free to think, and we're free to question authority—any kind of authority." He urges viewers to challenge established institutions, including their own assumptions.

“I think now when we're in a place and time where you know there's so much trying to ask for attention, but the attention they're asking for is a kind of is a diversion from reality in a way is a diversion from facts is a diversion from truth,” Tiravanija says.

Tiravanija talks shares his view of the world at the occasion of his most recent work ‘A Million Rabbit Holes (2024), reflecting the events leading up to the US selection in November 2024.

Throughout the discussion, Rirkrit Tiravanija draws on personal observations and global political concerns, highlighting the dangers of uncritical acceptance: "We're coming to a place where the dreams are going to be shattered, there is no more dream."

Tiravanija also reflects on the commodification of art, arguing for a return to its radical roots: "Art has to stop becoming commodified and art has to go out and back into the woods as it was. Or maybe Duchamp, like has said, you know, it's time to go underground."

Despite the challenges ahead, the artist remains hopeful that crisis can be a catalyst for change: "I think we're coming to a big crisis and I I think, and I hope, that crisis is extreme enough to wake people up, to come together, to do things together in opposition to those things that are being set on us."

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A MILLION RABBIT HOLES at Gammel Strand, Copenhagen →

Rirkrit Tiravanija
March 6 - August 31, 2025 | Gammel Strand, Copenhagen

A MILLION RABBIT HOLES is a total installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija reflecting the feverish atmosphere leading up to the U.S. election and the polarization the country is undergoing.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is one of the most influential contemporary artists and a pioneer in participatory contemporary art. His works highlight the connections that unite us across differences — an ever more relevant theme in a time marked by disinformation, alternative truths, and echo chambers.

In this piece, you step into a total installation, drawn from a forestry setting in Upstate New York, subtly addressing the intense polarization the U.S. is currently experiencing.

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Most influential people in 2024 in the contemporary artworld →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtReview

Photo: Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy Rirkrit Tiravanija and David Zwirner

‘My interest is always to break down the distance between what we think [of] as art or high art and what we do in our daily life,’ Tiravanija once told The Korea Herald. During his close-to-40-year engagement with what has been characterised as relational aesthetics, the Thai artist has become known for his participatory events, from cooking pad thai for gallery goers to providing them with ping-pong tables. You’d think it might be tricky to encapsulate such a career in a retrospective, but his MoMA PS1 survey, which closed in March, before moving to LUMA Arles in June, had a go, as did a second retrospective at Gropius Bau, Berlin, which opened in September, serving curry and Turkish coffees, and providing hangout spaces where the interactions are the work.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Latest Show in London Tackles Disillusionment and Political Polarization →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Observer Magazine

Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias

By Elisa Carollo

For his latest exhibition, “A MILLION RABBIT HOLES,” on view at Pilar Corrias in London during Frieze Art Week, Tiravanija has created an immersive environment that captures the atmosphere of American politics in the run-up to the presidential election next month while also reflecting on the dangerous polarization spreading across countries facing shared geopolitical uncertainties. Ahead of the opening, Observer connected with the artist to discuss the themes that shaped the show and the evolving meaning of “relational art,” with its inherently political dimension.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: ‘Food is an easy door to go through. It’s something we all do' →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Financial Times

Rirkrit Tiravanija opening for A LOT OF PEOPLE at MoMA PS1, 2023. Photo by Marissa Alper.

By Caroline Roux

“Food is an easy door to go through,” says the artist of his preferred medium of engagement. “It’s something we all do.” There will be no cooking here, but the influence of “Pad Thai” is all over the show. It is here in a series of woks that have been fetishised as art objets, while upstairs, in an area cordoned off with stacks of art books and catalogues, a man is making Turkish coffee on two electric rings. “It’s the opposite of an espresso,” says the barista, an Iranian drafted in from Luma’s catering staff. It is delicious, not strong but fruity and scented with just the right amount of rose water.

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A Thailand Unified at Its Third National Biennial →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | FRIEZE Magazine

Portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija.

By Vipash Purichanont

Assembled by an all-Thai curatorial team, the third Thailand Biennale brilliantly exhibits the rich cultural milieu of the country’s Golden Triangle, near Laos and Myanmar

Titled ‘The Open World’, the third edition of the Thailand Biennale is held in the northern province of Chiang Rai. Assembled by an all-Thai curatorial team, the government-supported biennial is led by artistic directors Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong in tandem with co-curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA PS1 →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | SPIKE Art Magazine

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2017 (fear eats the soul) (white flag), 2017. Installation view, MoMA PS1, New York, 2023. All images courtesy: MoMA PS1, New York. Photos: Kyle Knodell

By Aodhan Madden

Transcending relational aesthetics, a New York retrospective catalogues the artist’s troubling of Western objecthood and the commodification of “Tiravanija” in a globalized art world.

I was born in neither the right place nor the right time to eat pad thai in a New York gallery. “A LOT OF PEOPLE,” Rirkrit Tiravanija’s first major institutional retrospective, reminds me that this only makes things more interesting. Bringing together four decades of work, from his early “spirit house” sculptures to his more recent text-based works, the exhibition complicates any simple rendering of Tiravanija as a “relational” artist, maintaining a critical tension between ambivalence and anachronism.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija: Can Pad Thai Diplomacy Change the World?

Rirkrit Tiravanija | The New York Times

Rirkrit Tiravanija. untitled 1990 (pad thai). Ingredients for pad thai, utensils, electric woks, and a lot of people. Installation view, Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE, on view at MoMA PS1 from October 12, 2023 through March 4, 2024. Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Marissa Alper

By Travis Diehl

“Having been labeled as the cook of the art world,” Rirkrit Tiravanija said, “I think people come to see my work expecting to interact.” Indeed, they expect to eat.

The 62-year-old artist is easily the most influential of the loose cadre that rose to prominence in the early 1990s under the banner of “relational aesthetics” — a kind of installation- and performance-based conceptual work that makes spectators feel like participants. Tiravanija’s “untitled 1990 (pad Thai),” in which he cooked and served noodles in the back room of Paula Allen Gallery, is quintessential.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija with David Ross

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Brooklyn Rail

Portrait of Rirkrit Tiravanija, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.

By David Ross

When Rirkrit Tiravanija was invited to participate in the 1995 biennial, David Ross was serving as the museum’s director. Tiravanija’s contribution was aggressive. His installation featured a plywood hut equipped with electric guitars. Anyone could play. Tiravanija’s art is one of activation, of meaning accrued through participation. On the occasion of the Thai artist’s retrospective exhibition at PS1, Ross reconnected with Tiravanija. Over multiple conversations they discussed the evolving role of the artist, how Tiravanija adapts his work for museums while sustaining the life force it’s meant to cultivate, and the empowering role played by educators.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija : NO MORE REALITY →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Rosanna Albertini

Composite: Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled (no more reality), 2023, paint on newspaper mounted on linen, 96 x 981 inches, 243.8 x 2491.7 cm.

By Rosanna Albertini

No More Reality and my despair having lost the certainty about what words bring to us. What about thinking? Based on words? Not entirely, our primitive ancestors were thinking and acting before human language broke out from the brain.

Our whole body is a thinking machine: chemical conversation between cells, well organized behavior of organs : a musical score mysterious and impossible to decipher : there is no control on our body’s intelligence. AI is a technological dream. 

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Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023: The Open World

Rirkrit Tiravanija | e-flux

ArtBridge ChiangRai, Chiang Rai, Thailand, 2023. Photo courtesy of e-flux.

The Office of Contemporary Art and Culture (OCAC), Thailand Ministry of Culture, with the collaboration of The Provincial Government of Chiang Rai, on December 9 at 6pm. unveils the third installment of Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023 at Chiang Rai International Art Museum (CIAM).

Rirkrit Tiravanija is curating the biennial.

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