Nothing is what it seems...
8:44 p.m.
Untitled, by Rirkrit Tiravanija (2025)
From the exhibition In Aliens We Trust
In an overwhelmingly white room, almost blinding to the eyes, two individuals on the floor are fighting over a metallic object (?).
Nothing our minds construct from what we see is true. Another disoriented visitor labeled them as savages. But we no longer accept such descriptions: they are human beings, from bygone eras, when men were covered in fur as a defense mechanism against their environment.
The installation appears theatrical, playful, and strikingly eye-catching, like everything its creator, Rirkrit Tiravanija (Buenos Aires, 1961), does. Therefore, there is something more, and we discover it when the gallery facilitator approaches and tells us that the two figures are Tiravanija himself and his friend Udomsak Krisanamis, depicted as prehistoric creatures staring intently at a metallic object on the floor.
Up to that point, we thought these two men were ready to fight over the object, but that wasn't the case. The position mimics the stance of professional golfer Camilo Villegas as he studies his best shot, and the disputed metal object is an exact replica of the comb that Marcel Duchamp conceived in 1916.
It's astonishing what an image can provoke and how each human being produces a different discourse, sometimes literal, overly superficial, or reductive of what they see. Tiravanija, in this installation, doesn't intend to imitate the golfer's behavior to mock him, but rather to explore what emerges when an image is presented in a different context.
This is an artwork that deserves a public space so that all who approach it can understand that what we see isn't always reality.
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