Rirkrit Tiravanija - a Retrospective

Rirkrit Tiravanija thrives on the interactions between himself and strangers, friends new and old that he encounters on his travels. He insists that art should provide an occasion for geniality and sociability, an insistence that has enriched the environments he has traversed. Conceived as an artist's book, Rirkrit Tiravanija is also the artist's first monograph. It is constructed as a "storyboard" comprised of images from every work produced between 1989 and the present day. In collaboration with the great Paris designers M/M, Tiravanija offers us the most complete evaluation of his work to date, using as narrative backbone his numerous international retrospective exhibitions of 2004 and 2005 (at the Chiang Mai University Art Museum in Thailand, the Munich Kunstverein, the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Serpentine Gallery in London). As documentation, this book is an unsurpassed survey that demonstrates the conceptual unity of Tiravanija's seemingly disparate projects. Texts include written scenarios and scripts by the artist Philippe Parreno, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling and by Tiravanija himself. Also included is a post-retrospective conversation between the exhibitions' curators, among them Hans Ulrich Obrist. Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires (Argentina) Rirkrit Tiravanija lives and works in New York, Berlin and Bangkok.