Image above: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Lai Lee Ya, 2015, two channel video, ©Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Courtesy of Tyler Rollins Fine Art Gallery
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is one of Southeast Asia’s most respected and internationally active contemporary artists, and for the past 25 years, her video, installation, and graphic works have been regularly shown in institutions in her native Thailand and throughout the world.
Image above taken at the opening night by Kamila Ortiz
The first major survey of her work in the United States is currently on view at SculptureCenter in New York (January 25 – March 30, 2015), featuring an overview of her videos of the past 15 years and also including new sculptural works. Running concurrently, a solo exhibition at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Niranam (February 19 – April 11), presents a wide range of new works, encompassing video, installation, photography, and sculpture.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Cuckoo, 2015, two screens in one channel video, ©Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Courtesy of Tyler Rollins Fine Art Gallery
Born in Trad, Thailand, in 1956, Araya received her MFA from Silpakorn University in Bangkok in 1986, focusing on intaglio printmaking. Her etchings and aquatints of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with their ghost-like female figures in shadowy environments, set up themes – death, the body, and women’s experience – that would endure throughout her career. Feelings of loss and isolation, informed by the early death of her mother, and a heightened sensitivity to the strictures traditionally placed on women within Thai society, would increasingly find their expression in her work through the physicality of the body and the concreteness of sculptural installations, which by the early 1990s had become the primary focus of her work.