2 June – 16 July 2011
“Every life is in search of a narrative. … For the storytelling impulse is, and always has been, a desire for a certain ‘unity of life’. In our own postmodern era of fragmentation and fracture…narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity – individual and communal”,
Richard Kearney, On Stories, Routledge, 2002, p.4
Storytelling has been central to Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s artistic practice, whether it be filming the personal stories of mental patients in Thai hospitals, or performances in which Rasdjarmrearnsook herself reads poetry to corpses. The search for communication, translation and the understanding of things outside of normal comprehension is at the heart of her work.
This exhibition is about the village (the here) and elsewhere (the there) and we are invited to see how stories link people across continents, cultures and even time-periods. In 2008 Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook brought some visitors from elsewhere to her village in northern Thailand. The visitors came in the form of unfamiliar paintings and they told stories from long ago and far away: of dances in Parisian cafés, nude picnics, and haymaking. These paintings by Renoir, Manet, and Van Gogh prompted the villagers to share their own stories, which were recorded in Rasdjarmrearnsook’s series The Two Planets.
Continuing her investigation into the responses prompted by Western art works in those unschooled in Art History, The Village and Elsewhere includes films and photographs made during a trip to Japan. Rasdjarmrearnsook’s visit to Japan placed her as a stranger in a different culture and she took with her stories from the village. Over a period of 10 days, Rasdjarmrearnsook recorded Japanese Buddhist monks interacting with works by Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman. But as well as asking her collaborators to share their reactions to artworks, she also filmed and photographed her Japanese subjects responding to her films from The Two Planets series. In these new works, the Thai villagers are transformed into visitors: comedies, tragedies, problems and beliefs are transported to other places. The here becomes there; cultures, places and memories are layered one upon the other, to deny any definitive starting point. Rasdjarmrearnsook states, “We should start somewhere in the previous episode … or we can pick a place, an incident, a feeling or idea, another or ourselves to start with”. Perhaps then, The Village and Elsewhere has its beginning in us, the viewer: our stories and our recognition of what we would say when faced with visitors from elsewhere.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is a Professor of Fine Art at Chiang Mai University, Thailand and has exhibited widely. Solo exhibitions include: In This Circumstance, the Only Object of Concern is the Betrayal of the Moon, Ardel Gallery of Modern Art, Bangkok (2009); The Two Planets Series, Gimpel Fils, London (2008); Lament, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2003); Why Is It Poetry Rather than Awareness? National Gallery, Bangkok (2002); At Nightfall Candles Are Lighted, Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai and Chulalongkorn University Art Gallery, Bangkok (1999-2000). Group exhibitions include: The Museum as Pretext, Museu Emporda, & touring, Spain (2011-12); Body Gestures, The Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art (2011); Dreaming/Sleeping, Passage de Retz, Paris (2008); Insomnia, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, (2005). Rasdjarmrearnsook represented Thailand at the 51 Venice Biennale in 2005 and has participated in numerous international festivals and biennales, including, Sydney Biennale, Australia (2010); Unreal Asia, 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2009); and Poetic Justice, 8th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2003).
