No, he is certainly not one of the quiet ones, and his art has no desire to be quiet, either. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s projects are not enlivened by the viewer’s contemplation. They come to life by encouraging the viewer to enter, interact, or deal with them or simply by doing what he would otherwise do: touch the things, talk about them with others, consume them. Thereby, the spectator becomes an indispensable part of the artwork and expands the traditional given to him, namely that of a passive recipient. The key word is participation. Whether Tiravanija turns galleries into curry snack bars, reconstructs a life-size model of his New York apartment in an exhibition context, or opens a small supermarket in a museum: in all his works, his is a palpable attempt to counteract established boundaries, whether those between an institution and the rest of the world, between art and everyday life, or between the reception and the production of art.

It is almost self-understood that their focal points are the relationships, especially the social ones that emerge – rather than the finished work. And it is equally self-evident that, despite all meticulous planning, chance plays the crucial role. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the choice of which work Tiravanija will actually bring to the art berlin contemporary and what will in fact happen remains open-ended. Nothing is revealed. This, too, is an attempt to overcome calculability.

The artist, born in Buenos Aires in 1961, lives in New York, Berlin, and Thailand. At the beginning of the 1990s, he became known for installations that established a special relationship with viewers. He can be regarded as one of the primary protagonists of “relational aesthetics.”