Rirkrit Tiravanija (Buenos Aires, 1961) builds his artistic practice around interaction with the public, which is stimulated and engaged through creativity operating on multiple levels—both conceptual and project-based— resulting in a fully encompassing use of art.
Engaging with performance, video production, and even cooking, Tiravanija incorporates his nomadic and multicultural background into his artistic practice, which is therefore inevitably site-specific.
To reach The House (the Cat) Built, visitors must navigate a large labyrinth constructed from ordinary scaffolding structures and orange fabric. The exhibition path is literally built, yet not predetermined: choices may lead to a dead end or to a space that is never empty, but rather inhabited primarily by wooden architectural structures designed as tributes to the work of major architects such as Le Corbusier and Frederick Kiesler. Space and time are the essential components of an engagement and interaction that unfold on multiple levels, continually examining – and prompting the participating audience to reflect on – issues that are as everyday as they are universal: fear, play, education, and ecology.
The invitation to critical engagement is always conveyed in a collaborative manner: the puzzle does not assemble itself, and the tent is always meant for two. The house becomes the symbol of this convergence between collaborative practice and the rethinking of space—an invitation to observe details (and discover works by other artists who have collaborated, in fact, with Tiravanija’s practice) and to pay attention to how time is inhabited, interpreted, and lived more broadly.
Objects are consistently employed within their relational dimension, whether precious or ordinary is irrelevant. The everyday enters both practical gestures and art without hierarchical distinction, whether it is making tea or expressing oneself in a jam session.
Tiravanija enacts and displays a reversal of roles: to the artist he assigns that of an activator, while the audience – participants or spectators, however they may be defined – is entrusted with constructing the work, day by day and moment by moment, and with observing its unfolding as spectators, like a cat that appropriates domestic space, moving lightly and silently.

The House That Jack Built is a solo exhibition by Rirkrit Tiravanija, curated by Lucia Aspesi and Vicente Todolí. The title draws on a nineteenth-century English nursery rhyme which, through a repetitive structure, tells not so much the story of the house or of Jack, but rather of the people who inhabited and lived in it. This intention is echoed by the artist himself, who shifts the focus by privileging the public’s active experience over mere contemplation.

Rirkrit Tiravanija
The House That Jack Built
Exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 2026 Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano
Photo Agostino Osio

Rirkrit Tiravanija, The House That Jack Built
Exhibition view, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano, 2026, Courtesy the artist and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milano
Photo Agostino Osio

08/04/26