The Way Things Go

The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija applies his signature social approach to art making to a group exhibition featuring 13 artists at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Arin Rungjang, Golden Teardrop (installation view), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and the Office of Contemporary Art and Culture

The exhibition, curated by Tiravanija focuses on the origins and subsequent journeys of “things,” in particular food and its function as a lubricant for social exchange.

Much of Tiravanija’s work – whether it is an installation, a print, a documentary, or a curatorial project – fosters the direct and creative engagement of the viewer, user, or participant. He is particularly known for his projects where “things” function as props for visitors to create something of their own, and his interest in how cultural products can foster social production of one kind or another. As a curator, he looks for relationships between his own practice and that of other artists, yielding a rich map of his role as a hyper-connector.

For this exhibition, Tiravanija invited artists from Asia and Europe, as well as from the San Francisco Bay Area, to contribute works related to the circulation and anthropology of seeds, plants, food, recipes, and related materials of kitchen culture that have migrated across regions and time. The exhibition uncovers narratives, reveals personal stories, and shares vignettes that lead to a larger understanding of the relevance of migration in the production of material culture, often by individuals who themselves are circulating across cultural geographies. In turn, these focused stories lead to larger scenes of human interaction and engagement by redrawing boundaries of trade and labor, colonization, political affiliation, and war – all of which have a profound impact on vernacular, local, and indigenous experiences.

Maria Thereza Alves, Three Seed Carriers — Maria Thereza Alves, *Three Seed Carriers*. Wake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth, 2008. nstallation; photographs, drawings (ink on paper), handwritten text on wall. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy the artist

For Tiravanija, origins, journeys, and the stories that surround them are catalysts for bringing people into a more intimate understanding of themselves and the interdependence of cultures. And it is the details and intimate experiences of people that continually emerge within the works on view. Thasnai Sethaseree’s make it like home . . . anywhere? (2002–14) is a meditation on personal effects and positive memories of home that Thai immigrants in Chicago shared with the artist.

Sethaseree translated these materials into detailed drawings, paintings, and sculptures that capture the spirit of the feeling between owner and object. Chihiro Minato’s Museum of Gourd (2012–ongoing), a collaboration with artists, hobbyists, and an archivist, is an exegesis on a natural product that has a long lineage of varied uses. Maria Thereza Alves has spent years considering how seeds migrate from one region to another and the consequences of their journeys and resettlements. For Wake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth (2008), she transported dirt from the Liwan district in Guangzhou to the contemporary art museum there, exposing previously buried and dormant seeds, and allowing them to germinate in order to create a monument garden – presented in this exhibition as a journey in a wall installation.

Camille Henrot, Living Underwater, 2013. Photo by Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris — Camille Henrot, *Living Underwater*, 2013. Photo by Camille Henrot. Courtesy the artist and kamel mennour, Paris

Arin Rungjang’s video and sculpture Golden Teardrop (2013) reassembles the fragmented layers of the history of Thong Yod, a common Thai dessert. Engaging the disjunctive layers of private and public dialogues, he traces the dessert through colonialism, trade routes, and personal journeys to its origins in Portugal. A contemporary oral history by a Japanese woman living in Thailand is overlaid onto this history to complete its complex portrait. Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s installation Monument of Sugar (2007), which is comprised of a 16-mm film essay and 304 blocks of sugar, involved the importation of 1,000 euro worth of sugar as minimalist sculptural blocks. Circumventing international trade regulations by converting a valuable commodity (sugar) into a work of art, their project exposes the complex sugar trade between the European Union and other countries while also exploring the larger intersection of social and political issues with artistic and aesthetic practices.

Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, Monument of Sugar, 2007, Courtesy the artists — Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, *Monument of Sugar*, 2007, Courtesy the artists

As the above examples suggest, Tiravanija has selected works that demonstrate the complexity of the global circulation of people and goods. Personal effects, gourds, seeds, a recipe, and sugar all yield stories that go beyond each artist’s personal intention, creating a larger story of interwoven meanings embedded in cultural geography and spatial history. Underlying Tiravanija’s attitude toward mobility, chance, and serendipity is his shared sensibility with a video by Peter Fischli and David Weiss included in the exhibition, The Way Things Go (1987), which he has appropriated as the title of the show.

until 24 May 2015
Rirkrit Tiravanija: The Way Things Go
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
701 Mission Street, San Francisco

The Way Things Go

The artist Rirkrit Tiravanija applies his signature social approach to art making to a group exhibition featuring 13 artists at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

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