Le Point d'ironie n°68 - Rirkrit Tiravanija

The Argentinian artist takes his questions to Nesw York, Berlin and Chiang Mai. He takes the reins of the latest issue of Point d'ironie.

Rirkrit Tiravanija's work questions the format of artworks and the exhibition system. A blend of performance, sculpture and installation, it transforms the artistic space into a place of social interaction, often dotted with meeting points and exchanges. Most often immaterial, his work invents new connections in a world founded on reciprocity, conviviality and hospitality. Whether transforming art centers and galleries into banquets, print shops or pirate radio stations, the artist strives to go beyond the usual spatial and temporal limits of the "white cube".

With his current project, Rirkrit Tiravanija pays tribute to the little-known Czechoslovakian conceptualist Július Koller (1939-2007), who is both a source of inspiration and creation for the artist. Based on the conceptual work of Július Koller, Rirkrit Tiravanija has been developing new works since early 2010 that reflect the subversion, irony and symbolic language of the Slovak artist who died in 2007. A question mark, a symbol frequently used by Koller, often as a subversive statement against the reality of life in the political system of the 70s. Tiravanija re-enacted this question mark in Vienna's St. Stephen's Square with over 100 participants, and in Mexico City's Zocalo, as a recreation of Julius Koller's 1970 performance Universal Futurological Question Mark.

The ⸮ originates from a talk between agnès b., Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist in 1997. Each issue is made by an artist who makes it his own and brings it up to a singular work of art. By means of its gratuitousness as well as of its size and circulation, the ⸮ is an atypical periodical which is distributed in scattered way (one hundred thousand copies are spread out over the world in museums, galleries, bookshops, schools, movie theatres, shops, etc.) Made up by the French writer Alcanter de Brahm at the end of the XIXth century, the ⸮ is punctuation mark used at the end of sentences (as an exclamation or a question mark) to point ironic passages in a text.

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