Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger, Anri Sala & Rirkrit Tiravanija: Exquisite Trust (Blindly Collective Collaborations)
18 March – 22 April 2017
“You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.” – Salvador Dalí
Jointly holding an impressive list of 18 international prestigious prizes, including the Hugo Boss Prize, the Enel Contemporary Award Prize, the Venice Biennale Golden Lion Award, and the Benesse Prize amongst many others, internationally renowned and accomplished artists Carsten Höller, Tobias Rehberger, Anri Sala, and Rirkrit Tiravanija celebrate STPI’s 15th year milestone as they take on a daring challenge to create artworks with the experimental institution through blind collaboration fueled by pure instinct and spontaneity.
Following the footsteps of the Surrealist masters, the luminary artist quartet used the game of Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse) in creating fantastic composite works. This bold process requires the artists to completely surrender their individual artistic control; an artist starts a work and the next artist—given only a sliver of what had already been created as guidance—picks up where the previous one left off. Free from calculated reasoning, each artwork is uniquely whimsical and unabashedly nonconformist – a melting pot of four individual parts guided into cohesion by the invisible hand of haphazard chance.
A chimpanzee, dust-based prints, corkscrews, fruit flies, gelatin prints on silkscreens, composite palm line drawings; these innovative and audacious works dare viewers to abandon rationality and any attempt to create meaning, liberating their imagination and urging them to embrace the inexplicable. A first for the artists and the STPI Creative Workshop team, the process challenged the limits of each individual and of collaboration itself. With no dialogue, no negotiation, and four distinct artistic styles, none of the artists knew or had any definitive say over the final result until the very end.
STPI Chief Printer Eitaro Ogawa states, “We were dealing with four very different artistic mentalities simultaneously, which amounts to four times the amount of experimentation and research. This stretched us mentally beyond the usual collaborations.”
