The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell. In the video, a woman, dressed in black with a white over shirt, stands in front of a long blackboard. The classroom’s rear walls and floor are covered in taut white fabric, given the room the sinister appearance of a sanitarium or a crime scene. Six bodies lay across the floor on silver morgue trays, their features all but obscured by gently draped white sheets. The woman at the front of the class begins to lecture to the lifeless bodies with a clear and calm diction. As she turns to address the rear wall, she grabs the chalk and writes her topic on the blackboard: death. She then proceeds with her monologue, discussing how death is addressed and approached from various historical, cultural, and philosophical perspectives. She occasionally addresses the lifeless bodies, imploring them to share their own perspectives and experiences. She continues to speak, undeterred by the lack of response or reciprocity. Deliberately absurdist in its premise, Rasdjarmrearnsook’s video parodies pedagogical conventions, and the metaphor here of the corpse-as-student plays off humorous tropes of being literally “bored to death.” But in opening a conversation about death – which is often considered too taboo to casually discuss in many cultures (and particularly in the West) – Rasdjarmrearnsook also questions how we treat conversations around mortality in public discourse and how those dialogues, while vital, all too often fall upon deaf ears until it is too late.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsoon began producing film and video-based work in the 1990s. Her work considers a wide range of subjects but focuses in particular at populations that live on the margins and/or are marginalized by normative social structures, including women, the deceased, and people with disabilities. She even considers the rights of animals in her work and assumed hierarchies between species. Her narrative work confronts societal norms and structures of power and pedagogy. She earned fine arts degrees from Silpakorn University, Thailand and has exhibited in many venues internationally, including Documenta 13 (2012).
In Reyes’s words, “We should be able to extract the technological nutrients before we excrete our waste...
En rachâchant is based on the short story Ah! Ernesto! (1971) by Marguerite Duras in which the child Ernesto does not want to go to school anymore as all that he is taught are things he does not know...
C& Magazine’s Highlights of 2023 You Might Want to Read Again | Contemporary And search for something search C& AMÉRICA LATINA EN FR MEMBERSHIP EN FR Editorial All Editorial Features Installation Views Inside the Library Interviews News Opinions Events All Events Art Fairs Conferences Exhibitions Festivals Performances Screenings Talks / Workshops C& Projects C& Artists’ Editions C& Commissions C& Center of Unfinished Business Show me your shelves! C& Education Mentoring Program Critical Writing Workshops Lectures / Seminars Membership Opportunities Print C& Audio Archive On Tour Places Explore IN CONVERSATION INSTALLATION VIEW WE GOT ISSUES DETOX LABORATORY OF SOLIDARITY CONSCIOUS CODES CURRICULUM OF CONNECTIONS LOVE ACTUALLY OVER THE RADAR BLACK CULTURES MATTER INSIDE THE LIBRARY LOOKING BACK Follow About Contact Newsletter Advertise Imprint Data protection Membership Contemporary And (C&) is funded by: Editorial All Editorial Features Installation Views Inside the Library Interviews News Opinions Events All Events Art Fairs Conferences Exhibitions Festivals Performances Screenings Talks / Workshops C& Projects C& Artists’ Editions C& Commissions C& Center of Unfinished Business Show me your shelves! C& Education Mentoring Program Critical Writing Workshops Lectures / Seminars Membership Opportunities Print C& Audio Archive On Tour Places Explore IN CONVERSATION INSTALLATION VIEW WE GOT ISSUES DETOX LABORATORY OF SOLIDARITY CONSCIOUS CODES CURRICULUM OF CONNECTIONS LOVE ACTUALLY OVER THE RADAR BLACK CULTURES MATTER INSIDE THE LIBRARY LOOKING BACK GO TO C& AMÉRICA LATINA About Contact Newsletter Advertise Imprint Data protection Membership Best of 2023 C& Magazine’s Highlights of 2023 You Might Want to Read Again From climate colonialism to new perspectives from queer artists in Mozambique, these are some of our most-read articles this year...
Rotation presents the image of a crowd, a re-appropriation of 19th or beginning of 20th century photographs published in newspapers and magazines...
Created during Zhao Renhui’s residency at Kadist SF in 2014, Zhao Renhui began observing and cataloguing insects inspired by the scientific impulse towards exhaustive taxonomy of Sacramento-based Dr...
British Street Artist Hush Makes His Curatorial Debut At NY’s Vandal – Art Report News ARTISTS Artist Highlights Artist Interviews Studio Visit VIDEOS ART+ Community Listicles No Result View All Result News ARTISTS Artist Highlights Artist Interviews Studio Visit VIDEOS ART+ Community Listicles No Result View All Result No Result View All Result British Street Artist Hush Makes His Curatorial Debut At NY’s Vandal by December Projects Jan 22, 2016 in Artist Interviews 0 Installation Close Up, Hush...