The Class
2005 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
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).
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » TATE EXHIBITIONS
American Artist
Vija Celmins | Hatton Gallery See the work of Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle ARTIST ROOMS Vija Celmins takes an in-depth look at the artist’s works on paper...
© » KADIST
Marc Nagtzaam
2014Nagtzaam’s medium is drawing and his repertory of forms varies from abstract hard-edge and wall drawing to the reproduction of written material that he collects from art magazines...
© » KADIST
Jes Fan
2020The Diagram series relates broadly both to Jes Fan’s interests in body modification and gender hacking as well as the artist’s investment in destabilizing hegemonic categories such as gender, monogamy, and the classical individuated subject in favor of more creative, egalitarian, and communal modes of envisioning ourselves...
© » SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
Enlarged windows, glass bricks and balustrades allow light to flow through Hong Kong village home after renovation | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Architecture and design + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more When work was thin during the pandemic, an interior designer tapped her employees to overhaul her family’s three-storey villa with garden in Sai Kung, Hong Kong...
© » KADIST
Karl Haendel
2011Haendel’s series Knights (2011) is a set of impeccably drafted, nine-foot-tall pencil drawings depicting full suits of armor...
© » KADIST
Fernanda Gomes
2013For this floor based work, Gomes has taken two lengths of bamboo and tied them together using linen thread...
© » KADIST
Felix Gmelin
2004Ambiguous Gestures takes as its point of origin a film Gmelin discovered in his father’s archive...
© » KADIST
Until It Makes Sense October 15 – December 11, 2011 With: Saâdane Afif – Yto Barrada – Matti Braun – Matthew Buckingham – Peter Friedl – Mario Garcia Torres – Pratchaya Phinthong – Walid Raad Curator: Jean-Marc Prevost The exhibition gathers an ensemble of works from the Kadist collection which remain open to suspensions and to shifts in meaning...
© » ARTREPORT
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...