Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, Thailand) is an artist, writer, and semi-retired Professor at Chiang Mai University, where she established the pioneering Multidisciplinary Arts programme. She holds a BFA and an MFA in graphic arts from Silpakorn University, Bangkok (1986), and a diploma and MA from the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Germany (1990, 1994). “Everyone loves love stories – maybe even dead people!” said Araya in 2005 about Reading Inaow for Female Corpse (Lament Series). This is the first moving image work in which Araya reads to a human corpse, and one of her earliest moving image works. The artist continued making moving image works with human corpses until 2005, when Conversation I and The Class – both moving image works in which the artist appears with human corpses – were exhibited in a solo presentation at the Venice Biennale. The first in the Lament trilogy, sometimes shown as a 3-channel video installation, Reading Inaow for Female Corpse is arguably the most poignant, due to the careful juxtaposition of the artist’s breathy, singsong voice reciting the lyric poem, and a series of changing camera angles which include closeups of the book, and of the body’s exposed skin. The text is an early modern Thai literary classic, written by King Rama II, but based on a Javanese text, and also appearing in Myanmar. The same text also appears in The Lovers, as well as other works, linking this early video to these other installation and related pieces.
