Cooking up ideas on the world stage | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

Buenos Aires-born, New York- and Berlin-residing, Chiang Mai-rooted artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is this weekend serving massaman curry at Art Basel in Switzerland, the largest annual contemporary art market in the world. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music, and this show is no different, featuring curry along with charcoal drawings of recent political turbulence in the Middle East.

Long an established name on the international art scene, Rirkrit has exhibited in Switzerland many times, in museums since 1993 and at Art Basel, and featured by galleries from Europe, the US, Mexico and Japan, since the late 1990s.

This year he is collaborating with Bangkok's 100 Tonson Gallery, which petitioned Art Basel for years before being accepted and is the only gallery from Southeast Asia at the fair. Rirkrit had much success with "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Green?", an exhibition urging societal harmony in the context of contrasting political views, at the gallery last August, and the presentation at Art Basel is similar, although the green, yellow and red curries have been replaced by their milder, Persian-origin cousin, and the images depict democracy struggles in the Middle East rather than Thailand.