Titled “We don’t recognise what we don’t see,” the present is a visceral expertise provocatively designed to have interaction the thoughts and senses, conceived from works created throughout Tiravanija’s third residency with STPI (over a interval from 2019 to 2023).

As the place to begin of Tiravanija’s Extinction collection, he appropriates work by the Previous Masters to touch upon how the Enlightenment exacerbated the nature-culture divide, with a thirst for science and data lowering the company and regard for non-human lifeforms within the pure ecology. He disrupts the narrative of those artworks by eradicating all traces of residing creatures and screenprinted extinct or quasi-extinct animals with photo voltaic mud ink of their stead, seen solely when ultraviolet mild is shined on the art work’s floor. In doing so, Tiravanija spotlights the disappearance of those animals, and the way such historic reverberations and methods of seeing could have contributed to our “blindness” and disrespect in direction of the extinction disaster.

In Tombstones, 20 tombstones for 20 extinct animals are engraved aluminum plates and organized in a graveyard, monuments to what as soon as lived however has ceased to exist. Within the phrases if curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the graveyard can also be an “anti-extinction” work, because it encourages the viewers to create a frottage with the “tombstones” as the bottom. Because the viewers repeatedly imprints a picture of the animals, they assume a significant position within the existence and circulation of the artworks. By means of this, Tiravanija memorialises and conjures up the previous lives of those animals, their disappearance in up to date occasions, and speculates on what else could disappear down the highway, with the (ghostly) look of those animals as harbingers of a dystopian future.

The exhibition’s titular work “We don’t recognise what we don’t see” commemorates the connection between the orangutan mom and youngster—a bond that’s extensively related to the orangutan. As an alternative of representing them alive, Tiravanija used skulls for the mom and youngster as an alternative, enjoying with the motif of memento mori. This sobering reminder of mortality is just seen through ultraviolet mild, as he thoughtfully invitations the viewers to acknowledge the silent and invisible risk of extinction plaguing residing creatures all around the globe, in addition to to reckon with humankind’s personal attainable extinction.

Born from a meditation on the worth and remedy of different lifeforms, Tiravanija concluded that humankind’s inconsequential regard for animals and our pure world stem from mankind’s hubris, blinding us to the devastating penalties of the cumulative destruction round us.

The enduring collaboration with the STPI Inventive Workshop workforce is obvious in his ceaseless exploration of supplies and strategies all through his residencies, buoyed by the primary in 2013, and the second in 2015 with Anri Sala, Tobias Rehberger, and Carsten Höller. From 3D printing to using thermochromic ink (a heat-sensitive ink), the artist shows a eager consciousness and playful sensitivity in making a conceptually and technically cohesive physique of labor.

curated by
Hans Ulrich Obrist

at STPI, Singapore
till June 4, 2023