Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE

From the start of his practice, a critical material for Rirkrit Tiravanija has been the presence of “a lot of people”—a purposefully broad and expansive term that stands as an open invitation to everyone and anyone, present and future. Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE is conceived in partnership with MoMA PS1 where the exhibition premiered in 2023. It is a comprehensive survey of his work and one of the largest exhibitions of the artist to date in Europe. Rirkrit Tiravanija: A LOT OF PEOPLE traces four decades of the artist’s career and features over 100 works, from early experimentations with installation and film, to works on paper, photographs, ephemera, sculptures, and newly produced “plays” of key participatory pieces.

The exhibition brings together rarely seen early works from the late 1980s and 1990s, a period in which the artist was developing a post-studio practice and introducing biographical references to highlight his experiences as an immigrant with a palpable sense of “otherness” in a Western-centric art world. These works include many original sculptures, installations, and editions, some of which have been subsequently reimagined, cast, and memorialized over the years in new materials from plaster to bronze. Formative to his early practice, Tiravanija’s concern with the politics of the personal expanded into works that tackle global politics as well as the quotidian news cycle. To make many of these works, Tiravanija has set up a studio near his home in Chiang Mai, Thailand, creating an economy of art production that is explicitly localized and collaborative. Critical to the evolution of recent art worldwide, Tiravanija’s interdisciplinary practice has been transnational in scope, engaging notions of cultural difference, interrogating the parameters of place, and negotiating how people can come together.

Learn more at LUMA Arles.