Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary Thai artist who pioneered the Relational Aesthetics movement. By deconstructing the concept of art into its basic components, the artist focuses on the interactions between people and their surroundings rather than aesthetic objects. “My starting point was the search for my identity in foreign places, in places where I am estranged from myself,” he has explained. Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961, he grew up in multiple countries before attending the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In the 1990s, Tiravanija began producing works that revolved around his own personal history, as seen in his series of Untitled (1992) performances. During these events, gallery and museum-goers participated in cooking and consuming traditional Southeast Asian meals pad thai. Tiravanija has collaborated with a number of other artists in the course of his career, including Pierre Huyghe, Liam Gillick, and Philippe Parreno. In more recent years, the artist has had a number of ongoing projects, including The Land, which promotes environmental recovery, renewable energy, and food production in his native country. He holds residences in New York, NY, Berlin, Germany, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Today, Tiravanija’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.