August 6 2008
Stop Press – just confirmed:
Tiravanija confirmed for Spark
Attendees at Wintec’s 10th anniversary Spark festival are in for a treat. A last-minute confirmation of Thai artist
Rirkrit Tiravanija as a guest speaker was announced today.
Tiravanija will speak at 1.30pm on Thursday 7th at Wintec’s Hamilton city Campus Hub, and his appearance in Hamilton has
been made possible thanks to Spark’s relationship with Brian Butler at Artspace Gallery in Auckland.
Tiravanija is in the country primarily for his exhibition at Artspace, which will involve the creation of an issue of
Ver magazine. Ver is a publishing venture, developed by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Plan b. in Bangkok in 2002, where
visitors to the gallery are invited to participate in generating the material.
Susanna Wilford says the collaboration with Artspace is an exciting development for the festival, and enables Spark to
host Rirkrit Tiravanija for his only lecture in New Zealand outside of his Artspace project.
Since the 1990s Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work has had a profound influence on contemporary art, with celebrated curator
Laura Hopton calling him “arguably the most influential artist of his generation.”
“He has transformed the notion of conceptual art by taking his environments out of the museum to the ends of the earth,
literally,” says Hopton. “He has travelled extensively for the last decade and has been a great mentor and teacher to
many students all over the world.”
Redefining the space between sculpture, installation and performance, Tiravanija’s work has encouraged the direct
participation of museum and gallery visitors and focussed on the relationships formed between people. Tiravanija has
memorably created installations in which he cooked and served Thai curry to gallery visitors and built a fully
functioning, full-scale replica of his New York apartment for members of the public to use 24 hours a day.
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1961. He studied at the Ontario School of Art in Toronto, the
Banff Center School of Fine Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Whitney Independent Studies
Program in New York. He has developed significant projects for the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art New York,
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sydney Biennale and Venice Biennale, to name but a few from an extensive list of group, and
one-person shows in Asia, Europe, and North America. He lives and works in New York and Chiangmai.
ENDS