Learning doing nothing

Rirkrit Tiravanija's practice defies categorisation and encompasses traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. For Wide Open School, Tiravanija adopts what might seem at first to be an unorthodox approach to learning - the art of doing nothing.

Approximate duration: 3 hours

Rirkrit Tiravanija (b. 1961, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Over the past two decades Rirkrit Tiravanija has earned an international reputation as one of the leading pioneers of an art based on sociality. He typically approaches the gallery as a space for social interaction and says, 'it is not what you see that is important but what takes place between people.' His installations have involved transforming a gallery into a temporary kitchen where he cooked Thai curry and served it to exhibition visitors, and setting up apartments within galleries where he or visitors lived for the duration of the exhibition. In 1998 he co-founded The Land, a group project located on a rice farm in northern Thailand, which he characterises as 'an empty table top that people bring different projects to.' This has given rise to The One Year Project, where young people go for a year, to develop their ideas and take care of the place. Tiravanija says that The Land is, in a sense, 'nothing, but at the same time something is happening there, although I cannot tell you what it is.'