Rirkrit Tiravanija

In 2008, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, proposed an ambitious project to the Neiman Center’s Artistic Director, Tomas Vu-Daniel, which challenged the print publishing arm of the program and required the shop to build a collaborative team of students, faculty and administrators to see it through to completion.

Untitled (the map of the land of feeling) I-III presents 20 years of Tiravanija’s travels and life experiences as a visual narrative in three scrolls each measuring approximately 27 feet in length. The scrolls, at their center, incorporate a digital print of one of three passports the artist was issued between 1998 and 2008, including the visas and stamps from the places he had visited during that time. Surrounding the passports are layered and overlapping images of maps and schematic charts from the cities he visited, lines indicating their time zones, and works of art that have been influential to his artistic development.  

Tiravanija returned to the Neiman Center in the summer of 2019 to produce another large-scale project, Do We Dream Under the Same Sky, a multi-block woodcut printed over a digital image.   

Tiravanija (b. 1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a Thai artist whose work combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted by the Reiña Sofia, Madrid (1994); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); Philadelphia Museum of Art (1998); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2002); Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2002); Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2005), among others. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale (1993, 1999), Whitney Biennial (1995, 2005), Liverpool Biennial (2002, 2004), and São Paulo Biennial (2006). Tiravanija has received numerous awards and grants including the  Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gordon Matta Clark Foundation Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship, and the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Video on the project: Craig Robins Collection, Miami. Art & Design Collection videos: Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Articles on the project: Art in America, June / July 2011 issue, Real Clear Arts blog by Judith H. Dobrzynski

Learn more about this artist:

Guggenheim
MoMA