Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija came to prominence in the 1990s and is closely associated with relational aesthetics, a term used to characterize a generation of artists whose works have highlighted the social context of art and human relationships and given rise to new ways of conceiving art and its relationship to the gallery or museum. The son of a Thai diplomat, Tiravanija studied in Canada and the United States, including at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and has taken the social aspect of art to its logical extreme. His works have involved various actions set in exhibition spaces, such as cooking and serving Thai curry, re-creating a replica of his apartment and leaving it open day and night to visitors, building a pirate broadcasting station, and setting up a professional recording studio for anyone to use.

Untitled 2008–2011 (the map of the land of feeling) I–III is an ambitious project that makes use of a range of printing techniques. Across its three sheets, which together extend some eighty-four feet in length, Tiravanija draws on his personal history, presenting successive images of his passports across the years that document two decades of his international travels, as well as city plans and maps from places he visited. The work charts both time and space, including illustrations of archaeological labyrinths, symbols of movement, and renderings of ships to represent Christopher Columbus and Zheng He, a Chinese admiral who sailed around the world before European explorers. Additional depictions of a urinal and a pot of mussels respectively reference Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers, two significant artistic inspirations for Tiravanija.