COOKING UP CONVERSATIONS

In 1990, Rirkrit Tiravanija cooked Pad Thai at a tiny cooking station in the Paula Allen Gallery, New York, for visitors who had arrived expecting paintings and installations.

- ADITHI REENA AJITH

This act, also one of his famous works 'Untitled (Pad Thai)', was inspired by American artist Martha Rosler's 1975 series Semiotics of the Kitchen, where she plays an apron-clad housewife parodying television personality Julia Child's cooking shows of the 1960s, channeling rage and frustration at gender roles and the kitchen as a site of confinement.

Last week at Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, as part of their talk series 'Makers and Teachers', Tiravanija spoke with writer and curator Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi. The session, titled 'Making Without Objects' — also the name of his course at Columbia College of the Arts — offered insights into his evolving practice and how it informs his teaching.

For the Thai artist whose work aims at human connections and is built around participatory installations, 'Pad Thai' had a political undertone; the dish was a mid-20th-century invention of the Thai government, designed to create the country's unified identity. By cooking it in a gallery, he folded questions of cultural commodification into the work, a nod to The East is Red / The West is Bending by Rosler, which critiques Western appropriations of Asian culture.