Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born 1957) is a Thai artist who works primarily with film and video. She currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Early life and education

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook was born in Trat, Thailand, in 1957. At the age of three, she lost her mother as the result of a forced childbirth which was assisted by her physician father, and eight days after, the newborn sister. Three years after the death of her mother, Rasdjarmrearnsook found herself in his father's new household where she would again face deaths of family members in 1963.

Rasdjarmrearnsook received her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees in graphic art from Silpakorn University, Bangkok, in 1986.

Several of her early sculptural installations have been interpreted as speaking to the position of women in Thai society. In Isolated Hands (1992) and Departure of Thai Country Girls (1995), dismembered parts of female-coded bodies are presented in isolation; in the former, a pair of hands rest on a plate of water, and in the latter, pairs of upside-down legs are lined up on a wooden boat. In Isolated Moral Female Object, in a Relationship with a Male Bird II (1995), an isolated woman's head gazes out through a circular frame containing an image of the sky, while a sculptural bird flies freely through the frame.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, Rasdjarmrearnsook began to bring the rituals of the dead into her practice, accompanied by a shift to video work. She created a series of video works dealing with human corpses. This involved her filming her own rituals for the dead at morgues, in collaboration with the medical community. This includes works like 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), the Conversation series (2005) and The Class series (2005).

Rasdjarmrearnsook is well known for her writing as well as for her visual art. The artist has said, "I write and make visual art for my spiritual survival. Both help me approach states of mind that I cannot attain in real life. The difference between writing and making art is a question of process, time and the way both reach the viewers and readers".

Exhibitions

Rasdjarmrearnsook represented Thailand at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and exhibited at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, Germany, in 2012.

In January 2015, her first retrospective in the United States opened at SculptureCenter, New York.

Solo exhibitions Rasdjarmrearnsook's solo exhibitions include: SculptureCenter, New York (2015)

Group exhibitions

2013 Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia 2012 dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel 2012 Phantoms of Asia, San Francisco, United States 2010 17th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 2006 Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju 2006 Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern, Switzerland 2005 51st Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy 2004 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh 2003 8th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul, Turkey 1995 1st Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa 1993 1st Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia