Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Biography

In 2005, at the Venice Biennale, the Thai pavilion showed a multichannel video installation in which the artist stands at a blackboard and gives a lesson to six bodies lying on metal stretchers under white sheets. The work is called “The Class”. It was filmed in a morgue, in collaboration with doctors.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook was born on 26 July 1957 in Trat. When she was three, her mother died, and eight days later her newborn sister as well. As an exercise set by her father, she wrote short summaries of items from the newspaper Siam Rath. Her grandmother was a mother figure to her, and this bond became the basis of her first published short story. On her exhibition curriculum vitae the artist lists the dates of death of her parents and grandmother; to my mind, this explains a good deal about her work. She first attended a boarding school for girls, then the Chang Silpa College of Fine Art in Bangkok. In 1986 she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees in graphic art from Silpakorn University in Bangkok, working in intaglio printing: etching and aquatint. Then she left for Germany: in 1988–1990 she studied on a scholarship from the DAAD (the German Academic Exchange Service) at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, under Malte Sartorius and Karl-Christoph Schulz. On a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation she switched there to sculpture. She has given the reasons herself: Thai printmaking seemed to her conservative, she wanted to try new experiments, and a sculpture department in Thailand had turned her down. She received her diploma in fine art in 1990 and the title of Meisterschüler (master student) in 1994; by another account, her master’s degree there dates from 1994.

Since 1987 Rasdjarmrearnsook has taught at Chiang Mai University, where she also lives.

In the 1980s and 1990s she made etchings and sculptural installations. Some of her early works have been read as a statement about the position of women in Thai society. In “Isolated Hands” (1992) a pair of hands rests on a plate of water; in “Departure of Thai Country Girls” (1995) pairs of upside-down legs are lined up in a wooden boat. In “Isolated Moral Female Object, in a Relationship with a Male Bird II” (1995) a woman’s head gazes out through a circular frame holding an image of the sky, while a sculpted bird flies freely through it. In the late 1990s the artist began to bring rituals for the dead into her practice and moved to video. By her own account, in 1997 she went several times to the morgue of a hospital in Chiang Mai to film the bodies. In the morgues she sang for the dead, told them stories and read them poems, especially for those with no one to mourn them. The works from this period include “A Walk” (1996, 2003), “Reading for Corpses” (2002), “Chant for Female Corpse” (2001, 2002), “Sudsiri and Araya” (2002), “I’m Living” (2003), “Wind Princess, White Birds” (2006), and the “Conversation” and “The Class” series (both 2005).

Then she tried a different experiment: “Two Planets” (2007–2008) and “Village and Elsewhere” (2011). Villagers in the Thai countryside were shown reproductions of European paintings, among them Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass”, Millet’s “The Gleaners”, Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” and Jeff Koons’s “Wolfman”. The viewers sit with their backs to the camera, and their unpretentious comments appear in English subtitles. Dogs are a frequent motif in her work. At dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (2012) she lived for three weeks with a dog in a fenced-off house in the Karlsaue park, while monitors in the windows played footage of stray dogs on Thai streets.

Rasdjarmrearnsook is known as a writer too: she has published poetry and prose. “I write and make visual art for my spiritual survival,” she has said.

Solo exhibitions have been held at the National Gallery in Bangkok (1987, 1992, 1994, 1995, 2002), Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm (2003), the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore (2012), and the Denver Art Museum (2013–2014). In January 2015 her first retrospective in the United States opened at SculptureCenter in New York. Group exhibitions include the 1st Johannesburg Biennale (1995), the Istanbul Biennale (2003), the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2004), the Venice Biennale (2005), the Gwangju Biennale (2006), the Biennale of Sydney (2010) and the Jakarta Biennale (2013).