For Intense Proximity, Rirkrit Tiravanija presents a project with a title inspired by Rainer W. Fassbinder’s famous film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Exploring themes of solitude and migration, the film tells the love story of a young Moroccan man and an older German widow, set against a backdrop of culinary adventures and racial discrimination. Visitors are welcomed by the title of the film, written as though it were graffiti in spectacular proportion to the Palais Tokyo. Two autonomous spaces comprise the installation: one of them houses a silkscreen printing workshop where t-shirts are pressed with numerous slogans—“The days of this society is numbered,” “On Ne Peut Pas Simuler La Liberté,” or “Ne Travaillez Jamais;” the second part is a scale-model reproduction of a Tiravanija exhibition from his New York gallery in 1994. The coexistence of these two spaces results in a tug of war between melancholy and resistance, a frozen (almost mummified) past and a future of action and interaction.
Soup/No Soup, Rirkrit Tiravanija
April 7th 2012, from noon to midnight
free access
As a prelude to the opening of La Triennale 2012, Rirkrit Tiravanija has been invited to transform the main nave of Grand Palais into a formidably festive, large-scale, twelve-hour banquet composed of a single meal of Tom Ka soup. From noon until midnight, the Grand Palais will be open to the public, to share and sample a soup prepared and offered by the artist and his team. Generous yet modest, collective yet singular, Soup/No Soup convenes a summoning of all, where each and everyone will be able to enjoy an immaterial artistic experience based on encounter, and generosity.
By creating and recreating micro-communities the artist draws all the artistic energy from the bonds and relationships that are formed between the participants in his projects. From being a passive spectator, the visitor becomes a player in a developing work. Based on otherness, nomadism, and the displacement of signs and contexts, the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija is more often than not composed of meeting points and points of communication and exchange. Seeking to abolish the frontier between art and life, the artist constantly challenges the expectations, status and form of the work of art. The original, protean, unclassifiable artistic output of this cosmopolitan artist has been acclaimed on the international scene for around 20 years. Having long ago renewed the codes of the exhibition and of space, Rirkrit Tiravanija has rendered the dichotomy between installation, sculpture and performance obsolete. With Soup/No Soup, La Triennale declares right away its desire to federate all its energies round an ambitious artistic project that is open to all.
