Those with itinerant childhoods tend to be good at making friends; that’s a bit of cod psychology that might explain the Buenos Aires-born, Ethiopia- and Canada-raised Thai artist’s belief that with art ‘it is not what you see that is important, but what takes place between people’. If relational aesthetics is some 25 years old now, Tiravanija’s staging of social events feels as relevant as ever: his installations involving communal cooking, ping pong and t-shirt printing took over Haus der Kunst in Munich in spring, concurrent with a Bavarian State Opera production of Toshio Hosokawa’s Hanjo (2004) for which he created a see-through set design, and then his MoMA PS1 survey in New York in the autumn. His shows this year include a solo at STPI in Singapore, which dwelt on animal extinction; a collaborative survey between his galleries at Shinsegae Gallery, Seoul; a solo at 1301PE in Los Angeles; and a show at Montreal’s PHI Foundation. All this while cocurating the Thailand Biennale in March with Gridthiya Gaweewong, and somehow Tiravanija managed to find a balance between the momentary and the monumental, the local and the international.
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