From March 26 to July 26, 2026 Pirelli HangarBicocca presents “The House That Jack Built”, the first retrospective dedicated to the thirty-year architectural and spatial research of Rirkrit Tiravanija (Buenos Aires, 1961; lives and works between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai, Thailand). His work creates lively and participatory environments: in the Naves, the public will be an active protagonist and will be guided inside a gigantic labyrinth, where each encounter will become an opportunity for a shared experience of play, relaxation, care, conviviality, and participation.

At the center of Rirkrit Tiravanija's practice lies a dual objective: on one hand, a critique of the mechanisms of Western institutions that produce and legitimize knowledge through exhibition practices; on the other hand, the search for artistic forms capable of reactivating the context and everyday objects. The work becomes an open process, a tool for dialogue and transformation that stimulates encounters and the construction of a living community.

The exhibition brings together a significant selection of works that span the artist's entire career, highlighting his investigation into iconic buildings designed by masters of modernist architecture. Starting from replicas of projects by figures such as Sigurd Lewerentz, Le Corbusier, Rudolf Schindler, Frederick Kiesler, Jean Prouvé, Carlo Scarpa, and Philip Johnson, Tiravanija develops works in which structures are conceived as a space capable of speaking about those who inhabit it. The idea of construction is also evoked in the title of the exhibition, “The House That Jack Built”, which recalls the famous 18th-century English nursery rhyme, whose cumulative structure adds passages and chain actions progressively defining the unfolding of the narrative.