Storytellers of the Town is an exhibition of work by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook spanning two decades. Araya is one of Thailand’s foremost contemporary artists, whose practice is concerned with the fundamental aspects of life and death, collective experiences of history and fate, and the configuring of self through the redeployment of everyday images and situations. Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town includes seminal installation and video works, a number of which have never been presented outside of Thailand.

The installation Has Girl Lost Her Memory (1994), which has been reconstructed for 4A, presents the artists negotiations with traditional roles for women in Thailand, recognising the restrictions placed on her mother and grandmother, as well as her own attempts to surpass these limitations. Further exploring the circumvented space of women in Thai society, Great Times Message, Storytellers of the Town, The Insane (2002) is a multi-channel video installation which sees the artist give voice to those women whose experience in contemporary Thai society remains un-representable. By interviewing female patients of an insane asylum, Araya offers her subjects the opportunity to narrate their own experiences, while also drawing into focus a collective understanding of femaleness and the trauma that often accompanies it.

Having lost her mother at an early age, Araya’s work also attempts to create a space for the representation of death and loss. In The Class (2005) the artist leads a tutorial to a classroom of six corpses which are shrouded in white sheets and arranged side-by-side on silver morgue trays. The Class negotiates both the diversity of cultural attitudes towards mortality and the seeming futility of communicating with those that have passed.

In her more recent works, such as Some unexpected events sometimes bring momentary happiness. Afterwards, regret rises in our memory even for bygone hardship (2009) and Treachery of the Moon (2012) the artist shifts beyond the overriding sense of melancholia, creating works which are precariously imbued with humour, charm and joy. Often steeped with a sense of impermanence, sadness and loss, these works nonetheless act as a counterpoint to the artist’s contemplation of the emotional and physical trauma of female experiences and death.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Storytellers of the Town presents the artist’s attempts to find a language to represent her experience as a woman; a Thai person; a daughter and granddaughter; a teacher and as an individual who has experienced extreme loss through the deaths of those close to her.

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Access the Media Release here.

MEDIA COVERAGE

Lucy Rees, "Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook", Artand, 2014.

Jason Farago, "Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook",Artforum, 2014.

Nicholas Forrest, "Thai Artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook Emerges From the Shadows in Sydney", Blouin Artinfo, 14 March 2014.