Museum as Hub

Thursday, September 25, 7:30 p.m.
Rirkrit Tiravanija introduces the land with a screening of Phillippe Parreno’s Boy from Mars

Initiated in 1998, the land is the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place of and for social engagement. The land is located near the village of Sanpatong, twenty minutes from the center of the provincial capital Chiang Mai. Due to floods and high water levels, rice farming had not been very productive in this area in recent years. Though the action to acquire the rice fields was originally initiated by two artists from Thailand, the land was founded with anonymity and with out the concept of ownership. The land was to be cultivated as an open space, with certain intentions towards community, discussions, and experimentation in other fields of thought. The land and its topographical environment is cultivated through the philosophy and agricultural technique of Chaloui Kaewkong, a Thai farmer. The ideas around the cultivation of the topography, which is 1/4 earth (mass) and 3/4 water (liquid), is based on the composition of the human body. See thelandfoundation.org for more information.

Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija presents this project in conjunction with a screening of Phillipe Parreno’s 2003 film Boy from Mars (35 mm, 11 minutes, Dolby SR transferred to DVD).

Friday, September 26, 7:30 p.m.
Nikolaus Hirsch, Neil Logan, Molly Nesbit, and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Nikolaus Hirsch, Neil Logan, and Molly Nesbit discuss self-organization, alternative living, architecture, and utopia.

Following the discussion, all are welcome to stay for a live-stream Web broadcast of the presidential debate.

Saturday, September 27, 3 p.m.
TBD

Night School is an artist’s project by Anton Vidokle in the form of a temporary school. A yearlong program of monthly seminars and workshops, Night School draws upon a group of local and international artists, writers, and theorists to conceptualize and conduct the program. This month’s seminar is conceived by Rikrit Tiravanija.

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1961, and is based today in New York, Berlin, and Thailand. Tiravanija’s installations and actions provide platforms for artistic, public, and private activities—effectively blurring the boundaries that customarily separate them. His projects invite the public to enter into and literally engage with his work; in fact, the active participation of the viewer is necessary for the work to be fully realized. Tiravanija has exhibited widely including solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Portikus, Frankfurt; Secession, Vienna; Galerie für Zeitgenossische Kunst, Leipzig; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Chiang Mai University Art Museum, Thailand; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, and the Serpentine Gallery, London co-organized a retrospective of Tiravanija’s work in 2004–05. Notable group exhibitions featuring Tiravanija’s work include the Venice Biennial (1993, 1999, 2003); the Carnegie International (1995); the Whitney Biennial (1995); Manifesta 1 (1996); Skulptur Projekte, Münster (1997); the Berlin Biennial (1998); the Istanbul Biennial (2001); and Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition (2003). He will participate in “theanyspacewhatever” at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, opening in October 2008.

For the 50th International Venice Biennial (2003), Tiravanija co-curated “Utopia Station” with Molly Nesbitt and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Since 1998, Tiravanija has also been working on The Land, an ongoing, collaborative, environmental reclamation project in Thailand. He has been awarded numerous international honors and awards, including a Gordon Matta Clark Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts/Visual Arts, the Hugo Boss Prize, and the Silpathorn Award presented annually by the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture, Ministry of Culture of Thailand.

Tiravanija is Associate Professor of Professional Practice, Faculty of the Arts, at Columbia University, New York.

*This event is free but tickets are required. Tickets can be reserved online or at the Museum prior to the seminar’s start.