In 1990, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked Pad Thai at a tiny cooking station in the Paula Allen Gallery, New York, for visitors who had arrived expecting paintings and installations. This act, also one of his famous works ‘Untitled (Pad Thai)’, was inspired by American artist Martha Rosler’s 1975 series Semiotics of the Kitchen, where she plays an apron-clad housewife parodying television personality Julia Child’s cooking shows of the 1960s, channelling rage and frustration at gender roles and the kitchen as a site of confinement.
Last week at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, as part of their talk series Makers and Teachers, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija spoke with writer and curator Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi. The session, titled ‘Making Without Objects’ — also the name of his course at Columbia College of the Arts — offered insights into his evolving practice and how it informs his teaching.
For Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija whose work aims at human connections and is built around participatory installations, ‘Pad Thai’ had a political undertone; the dish was a mid-20th-century invention of the Thai government, designed to create the country’s unified identity. By cooking it in a gallery, he folded questions of cultural commodification into the work, a nod to The East is Red / The West is Bending by Rosler, which critiques Western appropriations of Asian culture.
Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija told the Delhi audience how he was running late on the day of the show, with friends and strangers drifting in to help stir noodles, serve plates, wash dishes. A collaboration of people improvising and eating together thus became the heart of the piece, defining his oeuvre of works that bring people together.
That day, Tiravanija’s Pad Thai altered expectations of how art is perceived, forging a connection between artist and audience beyond the object on display. “At the time, it was very challenging for people to understand how this was art,” says the 63-year-old.
Born in Buenos Aires to Thai parents, he grew up moving between countries — living in Montreal, Chicago, New York, Chiang Mai, and Berlin — shaping his view of art as a social space rather than an object to be made, finished, and shown.
Inspired by artists like Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, and the Fluxus movement, art was never just an object for him, but a way of being in the world. His works often became spaces where people could connect and interact, whether through cooking Pad Thai for strangers or hosting a twelve-hour banquet of Tom Kha soup as a prelude to the opening of La Triennale 2012.
Passing the torch
As a mentor for over two decades, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija guides young artists to hone their craft and think critically about the role of art today, careful not to impose his own 1990s mindset. He doesn’t “teach,” but “show them the road I went down… It’s also about the way one thinks, about how you find your way,” he says. “I don’t tell them what their work should look like. I ask them to think about why they’re making it, and for whom.”
One of Tiravanija’s most unconventional teaching projects began as a provocation: a “secret” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He asked students to create a one-inch-by-one-inch artwork and display it beside existing pieces without permission—“their first museum show”. “The institution always has its fear. And how do you deal with those fears? How do you find your way to get under their skin and behind their walls? That’s the first lesson,” he explains. “It’s legal — we’re not taking things away, we’re putting things in. Then I ask them to watch how people react.” Sometimes, they even add a price tag.
At the talk, Tiravanija expressed concern that the way we encounter art today, filtered through the rapid scroll of social media, has eroded our ability to describe and discuss it. He notes students who eagerly visit galleries and proclaim a show “great” yet cannot recall the artist’s name or articulate what they saw. For him, this signals a loss of language, a dependence on the internet over direct observation and reflection.
In a time when content is consumed faster than it can be processed, he urges young artists to pause, rely on memory, and describe their experiences before turning them into objects or posts. “Sometimes, the most sustainable act isn’t making something new, but telling the story well,” he says, adding that the real framework for making is creating conditions where others can act, rather than dictating the outcome.
This article is written by Adithi Reena Ajith
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