Thailand's Rasdjarmrearnsook exhibits in Canberra 2014

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s Storytellers of the Town, exhibited at Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra, Australia, represents three decades of her work. She exhibits prints and graphics, but primarily this showcases her video works.

She draws on her social background from northern and northeastern Thailand, where she has received several prizes for her artwork. The early prints exhibited in Canberra show a solitary flower in a barren field, called In Life in the Landscape (1980), and a print series, called Lao Duang Duan Goes Astray (1992), of squares with black reverse printing of Thai text.

The video The Class I (2005) is an eerie production with the artist lecturing corpses (under sheets) lying on the floor while she paces in front of a blackboard with the word DEATH on it. This is one of her iconic works.

In Great Times Message Storytellers of the Town, The Insane (2006), three black and white videos are playing simultaneously in which a woman sits on a chair and talks about her life. The three soundtracks merge, but when listened to individually, the audience realizes that each woman is rambling in a fractured manner and seemingly out of time and out of place. English text appears, but even so, it is their voices that tell of their life’s trauma in haunting, fractured ways.

In the main auditorium are three videos of her Two Planets series (2007-2012). Each one is on a screen with chairs in a semi-circle so that the audience can sit and watch. Yet each video shows Thai villagers sitting on chairs looking at large reproductions of European artworks and commenting on them. The audience can listen to their interpretations of these works that are, on the surface, alien to the villagers.

In a small room in the gallery are another two videos, showing the artist with her dogs watching television together.

Graphics around the exhibition are from Araya’s published works. One from Solo Exhibition National Art Gallery, Bangkok (1995) is the following:

The good girl tells me tales from her childhood.

The bad girl allows herself to speak of darkness.

The sad girl tells the sorrows of fading memory.

The happy girl cannot contain her joy and creates a pink painting.

The girl with a secret asks the sea to witness a letter.

The clever girl uses her students’ old plates to create a work uniquely her own.

The overarching theme of the exhibition, Storytellers of the Town, which runs from 4 July to 10 August 2014, is one of learning from death, misery, darkness, or traumatic emotion, rather than from laughter and joy. “It is the ‘moment’ that teaches us, more so than contentment does, to learn something either about ourselves, or the problem. That is my concept.”