Singapore
Emphasizing open relations and individual subjectivity, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s recent exhibition “SAY YES TO EVERYTHING” generated situations designed to “give everyone a chance.” Whether a home-cooked meal, a game of Mikado, camping, or a kite-flying excursion, his works evoke the commonplace, centered on being together and the collective elaboration of meaning. The creation of gestures takes precedence over the production of material things, an expression of when “attitudes become form.” But these charming diversions also represent an immediate response to the turbulence of our times: through beauty, insight, and provocation, Tiravanija strives to forge connections and instill a cooperative, and critical, sensibility to better understand the world.
untitled 2016 (unfortunes fortunes) (2016), for example, mimics the classic childhood game of Mikado, or pick-up sticks, encouraging visitors to bend down and pick up colorful wooden sticks from a pile on the floor without disturbing the others. When I joined in, I became self-conscious of the collaborative context and other participants’ gazes, hurriedly going on to take the corresponding stamp placed on a nearby shelf and have my fortune printed on the available paper. In the seminal untitled (lunch box) (1996)—activated several times over the run of the exhibition—visitors share a meal prepared by a local Thai restaurant at a table laid with traditional steel tiffin containers and Thai newspapers. The experience instantly produces a micro-community of diners who have been brought together by the scent of green curry, Tom Yum Goong, and Pad Thai, inverting their situation as strangers and as a result bringing attention to the subtleties of close interaction—listening, gestures, word choices, and silences.
Born in Argentina, Tiravanija leads a nomadic life, moving between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai. untitled 2008–2011 (the map of the land of feeling) I–III (2008–11), a series of horizontal scrolls with digital printing, screen printing, collage, and lithography, documents 20 years of his travels to different countries through his passports, visa stamps, handwritten notes, maps, and recipes. The work reveals some of the Thai artist’s most important ideas: his re-conceptualization of the relation between centers and peripheries (as an immigrant with a palpable sense of otherness in a Western world) and his advocating of a multiplicity of perspectives. Provocative mark-making, including swirling bands and frenetic arrow signs, dominates the work, which also features black silhouettes of rice cookers and specific designations like the Guangzhou Tourist Map, with sprawling networks of lines referencing flight routes, roads, and borders.
Several silkscreen-on-newspaper works in collaboration with Tomas Vu feature text and portraits overlaid onto wartime and political reporting. The texts, such as “DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY,” “THE INFAMOUS PRODUCT OF WESTERN CULTURE,” and “THE TYRANNY OF COMMON SENSE HAS REACHED ITS FINAL STAGE,” have the same arresting impact as gestures, becoming “political protests” that transfer the power of body language to a visual and written language of images and bold letters. In Tiravanija’s work, such gestures and actions become forms in themselves—the most important being the forms of individuals clustered together in the exhibition space, where social exchange accompanies aesthetics, inflecting and changing experience.
