remains of the day: allora & calzadilla and rirkrit tiravanija

What lingers, what remains? When wars, environmental disasters, and political unraveling dominate the news, what stays with us after the headlines fade? Media coverage dissipates as surely as flowers fall and decay, yet events leave their mark, shaping what and how we remember.

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s paintings layer charged phrases over pages from Mexican newspapers with once-urgent headlines. The works reveal how news structures memory, anchoring private and collective histories to particular dates. Newspapers from 2017 and 2024–25—years marked here by Trump’s first inauguration, California’s wildfires, and a solar eclipse spanning North America—show how time alters our perspective, depending on the political, environmental, or cosmic scale from which we view it. Across a series of canvases, the repeated phrase El miedo devora el alma (Fear Eats the Soul), borrowed from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film, warns of fear’s corrosive power—its ability to weaken solidarity, erode empathy, and fracture recognition of our interdependence with each other and the natural world.

On the gallery floor, hundreds of blossoms—cast from the flowers of the African baobab tree (Adansonia digitata)—appear swept by the wind. In Graft (2023), Allora & Calzadilla fabricated each flower from recycled plastic and hand-painted it in one of seven stages of decay, ranging from freshly fallen white to withered brown. The baobab, long associated with resilience and ancestral survival in African communities, was introduced to the Indian subcontinent through trade networks and to the Caribbean during the transatlantic slave trade. Yet even this long-lived species has been imperiled: in recent years, some of the world’s oldest and largest baobabs have perished due to drought and rising temperatures. Removed from their natural context, the flowers in the gallery evoke a fragile, paradoxical beauty shaped by histories of exploitation and enslavement, while pointing to the ecological precarity of the present and the uncertain future of a planet in crisis.

Amid scattered blossoms and newspapers, The Remains of the Day brings the fleeting and the lasting into dialogue, opening space to reflect on what remains—and what may slip away.