SUBMIT TO THE BLACK COMPOST
August 31, 2022 – October 7, 2022
Seoul
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This fall at Gladstone Seoul, Rirkrit Tiravanija will make his debut exhibition with the gallery, and his first solo show in Korea.
Tiravanija, a native of Thailand, came of age as an artist in the volatile and destabilized world of New York in the late 80s and early 90s. His first works and exhibitions upended everything we as viewers and ‘consumers’ of art held as being stable truth and reality.
As an artist, is there any real possible response or resistance to things as they now are? To this ever-degrading husk of human and natural condition? None. Nada. Zilch. We have painted ourselves into a corner and our hand has been replaced by a new other. A new face is in the mirror. A face without history. It does not age and it does not bleed.
Tiravanija, a floating, trans-national 21st century hermit, happily cedes the ground to this new unsleeping CREATIVE. He retreats and surrenders all, leaving one crucial message behind as he exits stage right.
This fall at Gladstone Seoul, Rirkrit Tiravanija will make his debut exhibition with the gallery, and his first solo show in Korea.
Tiravanija, a native of Thailand, came of age as an artist in the volatile and destabilized world of New York in the late 80s and early 90s. His first works and exhibitions upended everything we as viewers and ‘consumers’ of art held as being stable truth and reality.
Today, 30 years later, the world around art and culture, indeed the world itself, has transformed in profound and fundamental ways. Our world and our relations to each other are breaking. Art itself is in peril as a site of autonomy and freedom, hitched to capital like a hermit on a leash in the hands of the emperor.
As an artist, is there any real possible response or resistance to things as they now are? To this ever-degrading husk of human and natural condition? None. Nada. Zilch. We have painted ourselves into a corner and our hand has been replaced by a new other. A new face is in the mirror. A face without history. It does not age and it does not bleed.
Tiravanija, a floating, trans-national 21st century hermit, happily cedes the ground to this new unsleeping CREATIVE. He retreats and surrenders all, leaving one crucial message behind as he exits stage right.