Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961) is an Argentina born Thai artist who lives between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai. His his work carries strains of this nomadic existence, blending and re-combining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, Tiravanija’s work creates open-ended situations that allow the viewers to grapple with the proposed questions. The strength of Tiravanija’s work lies precisely in its ephemerality and the slippery ways it escapes definition; he takes the material of the every-day and re-stages it, allowing the viewer a perspective on the fleeting nature of life that is both banal and deeply profound.

Although Tiravanija’s artistic production spans many different mediums, he has accurately described it as “relational”; or as a body of work focused on real-time experience and exchange that breaks down the barriers between the object and the spectator. During this process Rirkrit’s work questions art object as fetish, and the sacredness of the gallery and museum display. Tiravanija is interested in subverting deeply-ingrained ways of interacting with art through novel forms of collaboration and exchange. This collaboration in turn moves to diminish the preciousness of objects by reconsidering their lifecycle and function while also remaining accessible to a broad public.

Work by the artist is represented in international museum and public collections, including Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Fond National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris; Fond Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) Occitanie Montpellier, France; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Fundación Tantica, Buenos Aires; Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Bangkok; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.