The following exercises are structured to sequentially build on each other. We encourage you to consider how their learning objectives develop as you engage with these activities or adapt them to your teaching.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1961, Rirkrit Tiravanija (pronounced ‘rik-rit tea-rah-vah-nit’) grew up largely in Thailand but moved frequently, living in Ethiopia and Canada due to his father’s work as a diplomat. After completing a BA at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1984, he subsequently pursued an MFA at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1986 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in New York between 1985–86.

Tiravanija is known for staging participatory installations centred on informal and everyday communal practices such as sharing meals. In 1990, he initiated a now-famous series of work by cooking and serving pad thai to an audience of gallery-goers, using an Americanized recipe that substituted the tamarind paste in the classic Thai dish for ketchup. With this work Tiravanija proposed that artworks could consist of the encounters and relationships between people sharing a meal rather than physical objects. This proposition became an important early example of a form of art termed ‘Relational Aesthetics’ by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, sparking a well-known debate about the social and political significance of such "relational works" with art historian Claire Bishop.

Tiravanija’s subsequent work continued to create and explore "situations" generating spontaneous and playful encounters between people through food, sound, film, and other communal activities. His multi-faceted practice has spanned installations engaging with modernist architecture, documentation of political protests, DJ sessions and film screenings, and an ongoing agricultural collective called "The Land" in Sanpatong, Thailand. Across these diverse projects Tiravanija foregrounds questions of cultural identity and (mis)translation, reflects upon the effects of globalization, and questions the dominance of European and American ideas about art in a global context. Core to his work is producing art whose central material is, as stated in his 2023–24 retrospective at MoMA/PS1 in New York, "A LOT OF PEOPLE."