Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
Quick Facts
Biography
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born 1957, Thailand) is a Thai artist who works primarily with film and video. She lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She represented Thailand at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), and exhibited at dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, 2012. In January 2015 her first retrospective in the United States opened at SculptureCenter, New York.
She studied at Silpakorn University, Bangkok, and Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig in Germany. She experimented with intaglio printmaking and sculptural installations in the 1990s, before moving into film and video. In her film The Class (2005), she gives a tutorial to six corpses who are lined up in morgue trays. In Two Planets (2007–08), a group of locals in a Thai countryside are presented with reproductions of 19th-century European paintings. They sit with their backs to the camera and their unpretentious reflections on the artworks are subtitled in English.