Rirkrit Tiravanija

Contemporary artist now based in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.
His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element in his work.
Rirkrit Tiravanija is widely recognised as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His practice defies media-based description combining traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action.
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tiravanija studied at the Ontario College of Art, Toronto, the Banff Center School of Fine Arts, Canada, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. He has exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide. Major solo retrospectives include Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1999); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2002); Chiang Mai University Art Museum (2004); Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen (2004); Museé de la Ville de Paris (2005), and Kunsthalle Bielefield (2010).
Tiravanija’s work has been recognised with numerous prestigious awards including the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award, the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2004) and the 2010 Absolut Art Award.
Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also President of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok where he maintains his primary residence and studio.