Biography of Alison Knowles & Rirkrit Tiravanija
Alison Knowles (born 1933 in New York, USA) is a key figure in the history of the American postwar avant-garde and an important member of the Fluxus movement. She is known both for her remarkable fusion of poetry, art and musical practices, as for a life rigorously dedicated to seeking a poetry of the everyday. Whether working with beans, shaving cream, paper, or other untraditional materials, Knowles has often experiment with forms often decades ahead of her peers. One such foray was her interest in computer-generated literature, already evinced in the early 1960s. She lives in New York, and continues to provide a radical take on even the simplest of gestures, some fifty years after beginning her practice.
Rirkrit Tiravanija (born 1961 in Buenos Aires, Argentina) came to the ceremonial side of artistic practice via an early interest in Fluxus and an awareness that the social side of art was as important as its formal aspect. Often utilizing food as a combustible, Tiravanija has galvanized museumgoers with his living situations set up as a artworks, with meals erected as monuments, and cardboard boxes and woks the left-over sculptures. Life as a material has become a further development for the artist, who has founded an artist's colony in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Currently the contemporary artist resides in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.