The message of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s flag is a reference to German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (the English translation of ‘Angst essen Seele auf’). The film first appeared in Tiravanija’s Untitled 1994 (Fear Eats the Soul), a bar he constructed at Esther Schipper’s storefront gallery in Cologne that only served beer and cola. Fassbinder’s two lead characters, a German cleaner and a Moroccan mechanic, meet in the film’s opening scene over the aforesaid drinks, and commence an unlikely relationship that brings out their own deepest fears as much as the xenophobia and racism of their surroundings.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2017 (fear eats the soul) (white flag) was on view April 4th – April 25th, 2018 at:
– Creative Time Headquarters, 59 East 4th Street, NY, NY
– 21C Museum Hotel Durham, 111 Corcoran St, Durham, NC
– Atlanta Contemporary, 535 Means Street, NW, Atlanta, GA
– Blue Star Contemporary, 116 Blue Star, San Antonio, TX
– California College of the Arts, 1111 8th Street, San Fransisco, CA
– The Commons, in partnership with the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1340 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS
– Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY
– John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University, 357 Benefit Street, Providence, RI
– KMAC Museum, 715 W Main St, Louisville, KY
– Light City, Baltimore, MD’s waterfront from the South Shore of the Inner Harbor to Harbor East
– MASS MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
– Mid-America Arts Alliance, 2018 Baltimore Ave, Kansas City, MO
– Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI
– Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Avenue, South Hall 1, Brooklyn, NY
– MOCA Jacksonville, 333 North Laura Street, Jacksonville, FL
– RISD Museum, 224 Benefit Street, Providence, RI
– SPACE, 536 Congress Street, Portland, ME
– Texas State Galleries, 233 West Sessom Drive, San Marcos, TX
– The Union for Contemporary Art, 2423 N 24th Street, Omaha, NE
– University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 3821 USF Holly Drive, Tampa, FL
– Wassaic Project, 37 Furnace Bank Road, Wassaic, NY
– Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ

Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961 and grew up in Thailand, Ethiopia and Canada. His practice defies media-based description combining traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action.

Creative Time has previously worked with Rirkrit Tiravanija on Living as Form.

Photograph by Guillaume Ziccarelli

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