Rirkrit Tiravanija’s 2022 Okayama Art Summit, Do We Dream Under the Same Sky, continued the artist-led experiment in a show that was both physically compact yet intellectually expansive

When it was launched back in 2016, Okayama Art Summit’s USP was that it was ‘an experiment directed by internationally renowned artists’: British artist Liam Gillick for the inaugural edition; Frenchman Pierre Huyghe in 2019; and now Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. (That all three have, at various times, been tagged as members of a gang who came to prominence through producing ‘relational’ art may constitute an overarching theme for the project.) Select works from those two previous editions pepper the city: among them Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s readymade How to Work Better (2016), a ten-point list (do one thing at a time; know the problem; distinguish sense from nonsense; say it simple; etc) the duo appropriated from a sign on the wall of a ceramic factory in Thailand, enumerated here down the side of a tower block; and Lawrence Weiner’s text work BLOCKS OF / COMPRESSED GRAPHITE / SET IN SUCH A MANNER / AS TO INTERFERE / WITH THE FLOW / OF NEUTRONS / FROM PLACE / TO PLACE (2017, from the 2019 edition) that cascades down the facade of the bunker-like Cinema Clair. You can take that as proof of either the project’s legacy or of the city’s submission to the language of art. Although as the evidence just cited indicates, that language is English.

Of course, after a decade of artist-led Kochi-Muziris biennales and last year’s Documenta (directed by art-collective ruangrupa) and Berlin Biennale (helmed by artist Kader Attia), that initial SP now seems a little less U, but the idea of the exhibition as a form of experiment, and the exhibition as a form of dialogue and forum for discussion (suggested by the somewhat curious ‘Summit’ branding), persists in a show featuring work by 27 artists and groups at ten sites physically compact (you can comfortably get around it on foot and in the space of a day) but intellectually expansive.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.