Prints have long been used to document and circulate images of other artworks. Artists in recent years have reinterpreted this practice, using prints and multiples as a means to reactivate ephemeral works and past events. Since the early 1990s, Rirkrit Tiravanija has published multiples in the form of backpacks, cooking utensils, and maps as part of his practice, which is based on interaction and exchange among participants. These commonplace objects used for cooking or camping serve today as memories of the artist’s earlier projects and also stimulate new interactions, whether physical or purely in the imagination.
In Untitled 2008–2011 (the map of the land of feeling), Tiravanija presents a visual chronology of his life and work between 1988 and 2008, as told through the pages of his expansive passport. Tiravanija has layered materials to both collapse and expand the passage of time in space. The work, whose format recalls traditional Chinese scrolls used for storytelling, prompts active investigation and movement in the viewer, serving, in the artist’s words, as “a drawing or map to the ideas.”