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.

More Information Here

Pick of the Week: Rirkrit Tiravanija →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | What’s on LA

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2023 (no more reality (for pp), the news sun, august 16, 2020), 2023, paint on newspaper mounted on linen, 24 x 22 inches, 61 x 55.9 cm.

By Jody Zellen

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist whose work has employed unusual and diverse mediums: cooking, staged readings and platforms for socializing. The forms and formats of his installations and presentations are participatory and unconventional, often involving the sharing of meals. That is not to say that Tiravanija does not also make objects and drawings that can hang on a wall or fill a conventional gallery space. In 2020, he covered the walls of The Drawing Center in New York with over 200 demonstration drawings — black and white works on paper derived from photographs of demonstrations published in the International Herald Tribune. World events and the propagation of news has long been an interest of his and for this installation, No More Reality (For PP), he covers the gallery walls with pages of daily American newspapers (collected in 2020).

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Visual Art: Rirkrit Tiravanija - Pad thai for the people: forty years of shaking up the space of art. →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | 4Columns

Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE, installation view. Courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo: Kyle Knodell. Pictured: untitled 1990 (pad thai), 1990. Mixed media.

By Alex Kitnick

Rirkrit Tiravanija is probably best known as the artist who cooks curry and gives it away for free. And this is not untrue. In 1992 he served bowls of the Thai dish at 303 Gallery in New York—and he has done so, in various locations, any number of times since. While his work, at least from this description, sounds like something that would have to be invented if it didn’t already exist, the way Tiravanija changes the space of art—transforming museums and galleries into third places, more like coffee or barber shops than chilly white cubes—has not been as frequently noted.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Spirited Survey Serves Up Social Interaction and Pad Thai →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Art in America

Installation view of Rirkrit Tiravanija's untitled 1990 (pad thai), at MoMA PS1, 2023. Photo: Marissa Alper

By Francesca Aton

If you’ve ever stood in a line for a home-cooked meal at an art exhibition, you might be familiar with the work of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who foregrounds interactions between people and their surroundings. Over the years, Tiravanija has served up Turkish coffee, pad Thai, and tea—all of which can be experienced in his exhibition “A Lot of People” at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York.

In constructing these scenarios, which he refers to as plays, Tiravanija invites museum-goers to participate and consider the ways we interact with one another. As human interaction (or safeguarding against it) came to the forefront during the pandemic, Tiravanija’s plays have only become more relevant. And if they are not enough to satisfy, the show also includes films, drawings, and works on paper.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Bracing MoMA PS1 Survey Is One of the Year’s Best Museum Shows →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ARTnews

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nico Dockx, untitled 2011 (erased Rirkrit Tiravanija demonstration drawing), 2011. Photo Fredrik Nilsen/Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles.

By Alex Greenberger

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s lively MoMA PS1 show, a strong candidate for the year’s finest New York museum exhibition, is a challenging experience. This is not because the art included is tough—although it does offer plenty of food for thought (and, in a few cases, for digestion, too)—but because the work on hand calls on viewers to do more than merely see it.

On at least three occasions, visitors are asked to lie down to experience the works. On two, they are given the opportunity to play music—including their own, made via guitars and a drum set, in one installation resembling a recording studio, minus a soundproofed wall. And, for one centrally placed artwork, visitors are even given the opportunity to perform a game of ping-pong; paddles, balls, and a table await players.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija Introduces Precious Okoyomon To His Chaos Menu →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Interview Magazine

By Precious Okoyomon

This past summer, at a former car dealership in Hancock, New York, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija spent the weekend cooking up curry for crowds of hungry art-goers and country neighbors. It’s all part of the upstate art gallery and canteen called Unclebrother, which the artist founded with the gallerist Gavin Brown a decade ago. But it’s also in keeping with the spirit of the Thai artist’s radical, interaction-focused, and food-centric artistic universe, which Tiravanija has explored and expanded ever since he served pad thai and curry to audiences in the early 1990s.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija's largest exhibition to date is now open at MoMA PS1

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtDaily

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 2014 (the days of this society is numbered / December 7, 2012). Photo: Thomas Griesel.

From the start of his practice, a critical material for Rirkrit Tiravanija (Thai, b. 1961) has been the presence of “a lot of people”—a purposefully broad and expansive term that stands as an open invitation to everyone and anyone, present and future. His largest exhibition to date, Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to works on paper, photographs, ephemera, sculptures, and newly produced “plays” of key participatory pieces.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija Is Cooking Up a Storm at MoMA PS1.

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Cultured Magazine

All photography of Rirkrit Tiravanija by Daniel Dorsa. All images courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner.

By Kat Herriman

Digestion is never instantaneous. Its nature is process. It spans hours, sometimes centuries. For example, a meal of rice noodles dressed with tamarind sauce and peanut crumbs—served in February 1990 as one of artist Rirkrit Tiravanija’s early food works, untitled 1990 (pad thai)—was probably extruded through the intestines of participating New Yorkers overnight.

But the radicality of the gesture remains deep in the guts of the art world, pervading our cultural biome and the way we see ourselves as artists and viewers. It is into these roiling bowels that curators Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond dared to venture, bringing us “A LOT OF PEOPLE.” The MoMA PS1 show, opening tomorrow, will be the inaugural U.S. survey of an artist who, for four decades, has actively worked against the shelf life of facts, objects, and identity by destabilizing (and simultaneously elucidating) the fungible borders between author and audience, material and idea, biography and lived experience.

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What I Buy and Why: Print Expert Judy Hecker Once Hunted Down a Work Written With Every Word of Dialogue From ‘Top Gun’

Fiona Banner and Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtNet

Judy Hecker in front of Joan Mitchell, Trees IV (1992), a lithograph on two sheets. Photo: Argenis Apolinario. Courtesy of Judy Hecker.

By Lee Carter

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated and knowledgeable expert in the field of printmaking than Judy Hecker. Since 2016, she’s served as the director of Print Center New York, the city’s leading nonprofit exhibition space for the paper-based medium. As such, she brings her passion for printmaking to bear on the institution’s programming, broadening the public’s understanding of prints and multiples as a discrete art form that offers real experimentation.

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This Week in Culture: Rirkrit Tiravanija →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Cultured Magazine

The newspapers in this collection vary in geographical origin, ideas, politics, and beliefs, emphasizing the impact of personal perspective in locally reported news. “Everywhere, we feel the shift of power under our feet; how can we not address it, even with our tongues in our cheeks!” said the artist in a statement. 

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Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “We Don’t Recognise What We Don’t See” →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | e-flux

Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2020 (we are not your pet), 2023, Diptych: (Left) Solar dust screenprint and archival digital pigment print on paper, (right) thermocromic screenprint and archival digital print on paper, each 70.8 x 58.5 cm x 4 cm.

By Christine Han

The formally diverse series of works that anchor Rirkrit Tiravanija’s new solo exhibition each highlight the accelerating inequity among living beings and propose tentative frameworks for their reconciliation. On entering the exhibition, the visitor is greeted by framed prints of five Old Master paintings which have been appropriated and adapted by Tiravanija. In twinned reproductions of Pietro Longhi’s Il rinoceronte (1751), for instance, Tiravanija has altered or partly obscured the original image of Clara—the first rhinoceros brought into Europe from Asia—as depicted in a Venetian carnival. The implication of the title (untitled, 2020 [we are not your pet], 2023) seems clear: to disrupt the idea that nature as distinct from humanity is something to be tamed and subordinated.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija and Hans Ulrich Obrist In Conversation →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | OCULA

Hans Ulrich Obrist (left) and Rirkrit Tiravanija (right)

Edited by Susan Acret

Tiravanija's first residency in 2013 took Charles Darwin's Tree of Life, which maps and names all biological life, as a starting point, while a residency in 2015 with Anri Sala, Tobias Rehberger, and Carsten Höller saw the four artists work collaboratively on collective works, using the premise of the exquisite corpse game as their impetus. The game was originally adopted by the Surrealists to collaboratively produce work and involves each participant taking turns writing or drawing on a sheet of paper, folding it to conceal his or her contribution, and then passing it to the next player for a further contribution.

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Pad Thai, Ping Pong, and More Will Head to MoMA PS1 for Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Biggest Show to Date →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | ArtNews

Installation view of "Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomorrow Is the Question," 2019, at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada.Courtesy Remai Modern/Photo Blaine Campbell

By Alex Greenberger

Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Thai artist behind famed interactive pieces that have enlisted materials as diverse as soup and social interactions, will have his first United States museum survey this fall at MoMA PS1 in New York, which is billing the show as his largest to date.

Curated by Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond, working in collaboration with Jody Graf and Kari Rittenbach, the show is set to be one of the biggest exhibitions PS1 has devoted to a single artist in the past few years, with more than 100 works in multiple mediums. It will open October 12 and run through March 2024.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija poses fundamental human questions →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Korea Herald

Installation view of "Rirkrit Tiravanija: Submit To The Black Compost" at Gladstone Gallery in Seoul (Courtesy of the artist and gallery)

By Park Yuna

Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely known for his intimate and participatory art, through which he engages with the audience. He would cook and serve up Thai food at an exhibition as part of the show, expanding the way in which people appreciate art.

A Thai born in Argentina and based in New York since the late 1980s, Tiravanija's Seoul debut exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, titled “Rirkrit Tiravanija: Submit To The Black Compost,” ended Oct. 7.

"For me, it has a deep meaning like looking at otherness, looking at difference and looking at the thing that is not you. Of course, in that sense empathy is very important because to function in a relationship to otherness, one needs their empathy,” Tiravanija said in a recent interview with The Korea Herald.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija →

Rirkrit Tiravanija | Sculpture Magazine

April 12, 2022 by John Gayer

Grimbergen, Belgium

Though pertaining to the global impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tiravanija’s pervasive use of “free” also urges us to consider its many meanings and associations. Today, that four-letter word resonates clearly, something that failed to happen 30 years ago. Jörn Schafaff emphasizes this point in the exhibition text, noting that untitled 1992 (free) was misunderstood as signifying “’free food for all,’ leaving its poetic dimensions largely unnoticed.”