Background
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born on July 21, 1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of a Thai diplomat and an oral surgeon.
Tiravanija was raised in such countries as Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada.
1125 Colonel By Dr, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada
Carleton University
100 McCaul St, Toronto, ON M5T 1W1, Canada
Ontario College of Art and Design
107 Tunnel Mountain Dr, Banff, AB T1L 1H5, Canada
Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
36 S Wabash Ave #1201, Chicago, IL 60603, United States
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, United States
Whitney Museum of American Art
4400 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States
Carnegie Museum of Art
1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128, United States
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Rirkrit Tiravanija at one of his cooking installations
Rirkrit Tiravanija on his cooking performance 'Do We Dream the Same Sky'
ฤกษ์ฤทธิ์ ตีระวนิช
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born on July 21, 1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of a Thai diplomat and an oral surgeon.
Tiravanija was raised in such countries as Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada.
Rirkrit Tiravanija had studied for a short period of time at the Carleton University and in 1980 left it for the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Canada where he had spent four years.
The year of the graduation from the College he began to attend classes at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Then, Tiravanija enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and had studied there till 1986.
Besides, he participated in the one-year Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art which began in 1985.
Rirkrit Tiravanija started his artistic career at the beginning of the 1990s when he presented one of his first projects dubbed ‘Pad Thai’ at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York City in 1990. During the performance, the visitors had an opportunity to help the artist in the preparation of the Southeast Asian meals and taste it after.
Since then, similar projects had become regular, like his second solo show a year later at the 303 Gallery in New York City. Tiravanija transformed the art place into a kind of the storage facility by filling it with heaps of cultural cast-offs. Another example of Tiravanija’s art was presented at the Carnegie International exhibition in 1995 when he accompanied the cooking process by the recipes texts of the South-east Asian green curry written on the wall.
In the subsequent exhibitions, Tiravanija managed to recreate in the galleries the small replica of Philip Johnson's Glass House (1997), the planning and furnishings of his own apartment (2005) and even a section of the Le Corbusier’s boat (2010).
In 2006, Tiravanija received a commission from the Vienna State Opera for which he produced a large-scale propagandist collage made of the newspaper drawings with the inscription ‘Fear Eats the Soul’ on its surface.
Rirkrit Tiravanija applied his artistic abilities and creative mind not only at the huge number of interactive installations. He tried his hand as the stage director, curator of different educational art projects and as the movie maker as well.
So, in 1998, the artist co-curated the educational-ecological project named ‘The Land’ along with his Thai colleague Kamin Lerdchaiprasert. The project provided the artists and the residents with the piece of land where they had a possibility to cultivate rice, build sustainable houses or use the solar power. Five years later, Tiravanija took part at the Station Utopia project at the 2003 Venice Biennale where he worked along with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Molly Nesbit. Besides, the artist is engaged in the activity of the Gallery VER located in Bangkok.
In 2007, Tiravanija’s opera ‘Il Tempo del postino’ (‘Postman Time’) created in a collaboration with well-known visual artists by the time was shown at the Manchester International Festival.
The following year, Rirkrit Tiravanija presented to the public his movie called ‘Chew the Fat’ at the exhibition held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. It features the portraits of twelve artists prominent in the 1990s. The second artist’s movie, a documentary dubbed ‘Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours’ was released in 2011 at the 68th Venice International Film Festival.
Nowadays, Rirkrit Tiravanija is working at Columbia University as the Professor of Professional Practice in Visual Arts in the Faculty of the Arts.
Untitled (apron and Thai pork sausage)
Lunch Box
Rucksack Installation
Untitled (Murder and Mayhem)
Untitled
Oil Drum Stage
Untitled 2017 (nothing rhymes with lobscouse, labskaus, lapskaus, lobskovs)
Untitled 2017 (Lars' voids)
Tent Installation
Bicycle Shower
No Thing
Tomorrow is on Our Tongue and Today Pass from Our Lips
Quotations:
"It is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people."
"If we have too much clarity, we might not be compelled to continue searching for new ideas."
"My starting point was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself."
"For me, staying in place might mean staying with my own thoughts, even if the body keeps travelling. I might be experiencing new things, but I'm also here, with myself."
"I never give too much thought to the idea of universality."
"I am a socialist, so I am not worried about socialism. I am worried about dictators who are putting everyone into a socialist state for their own benefit."
Rirkrit Tiravanija married the painter Elizabeth Peyton in 1991. The couple broke up at the end of the 1990s and officially divorced in 2004.