Rirkrit Tiravanija at Pirelli HangarBicocca | The House That Jack Built 2026
Discover The House That Jack Built by Rirkrit Tiravanija at Pirelli HangarBicocca: an immersive and participatory exhibition where the audience becomes the protagonist. From March 26 to July 26, 2026.

By Stefania Carrozzini

This exhibition is a journey through playful spaces, stages, and poetic dwellings, where everyone feels like the main character. The first thing you see upon entering Pirelli HangarBicocca is a spiral wooden structure that immediately introduces the participatory and dynamic dimension at the core of Tiravanija’s work. It is called Demo Station. You climb a small ramp to reach a floor where three microphones are placed. It is a place for resting and gathering. From above, you can observe the path that the scaffolding, covered with orange fabric, draws through the hangar. Descending, you truly enter the exhibition space and begin to discover the “works.” Works in quotation marks, because here it is not about looking, but about living inside them. This is not an exhibition to observe: it is an exhibition to walk through and inhabit with your body and thoughts. The concept of dwelling is central. Whether it is a tent or a structure, what matters is the relationship between being inside and being outside. The labyrinth at times generates a slight anxiety that is softened when the paths open up to situations where play becomes a moment of cohesion, action, and creation. The creative house follows a logic different from the usual environments we are used to. The dwelling spaces unfold unexpectedly before your eyes, constantly shifting your sense of orientation.
The title “The House That Jack Built” is not accidental: Tiravanija draws inspiration from the famous traditional English nursery rhyme, The House That Jack Built. The rhyme is built as a cumulative chain: each element adds to the previous one, creating an increasingly complex structure. In a house, things happen, and every element depends on the others. And for the artist, the “house” is an open system, growing, changing, and building itself over time, just like the rhyme. The exhibition is made of spaces within spaces, paths that accumulate, and experiences that layer on top of each other. Exactly like the cumulative structure of the rhyme. The audience completes the work, and “Jack” can be anyone—the artist or the visitor: by experiencing the exhibition, we build the house.
Untitled 2026 is an installation composed of two house models, reconstructions of the single-family house designed by architect Lewerentz, a prototype presented at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, a crucial event for the spread of Functionalism. Here, the prototype is a playful and creative space designed for children, with strictly no adult entry! Finally, a house proportioned to those who truly inhabit it: low doors, calibrated ceilings, all designed for a different body. Then the space opens to leisure: a place where music groups can perform, table football, and board games. We open the orange tents, challenging the labyrinth, deciding as a symbolic (but also practical) gesture that to exit the labyrinth one must use lateral thinking. It is a labyrinth that reminds us of the need to get lost to find ourselves. It does not matter if we do not immediately find the way; what truly matters is opening our minds creatively. Inhabiting uncertainty through creation. Tents appear with screens inside, projecting onto urban and natural landscapes. Or a forest of palms, an improbable labyrinth to build together. A wooden house with a Zen flavor but low ceilings, resembling an atrium or a nursery. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. Perhaps because I love “non-places,” I truly felt at ease there. The house, in the end, is not a place. It is a mental condition, a projection of thoughts. In this sense, Tiravanija’s space is a place that exists not only for its form but for how it is experienced, imagined, and traversed. Here, the poetic dimension is never solitary: it is shared, unstable, continuously modified by the presence of others.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca is not just an installation; it is an experience to live. An immersive journey that redefines the spectator as an active presence, transforming the space into a collective mental house. If you truly want to understand this exhibition, do not look from the outside: enter, walk, explore, play… and inhabit its freedom.
The exhibition is curated by Lucia Aspesi and Vicente Todoli.
From March 26 to July 26, 2026.