A desire for the dead body: Reading Thai female landscape from the morgue

This talk by Pandit Chanrochanakit, a PhD candidate in the Political Science Department, will explore how Araya Rasdjamrearnsook’s contemporary artworks denaturalize and destabilize the official version of the Thai national imaginary, which Chanrochanakit calls the "Siamese diorama." Its investigation focuses on two video installations: Conversation of Two Women (1998) and I am Living (2002).

The installations show Radsjamrearnsook engaging the female corpses—she reads poems for/on the dead bodies, talks to/on them, and even dresses them up. According to Thai critics, her artistic practices on the dead body were heavily criticized based on moral reason and considered “un-Thai.” She represents Thai Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, however.

This presentation will, moreover, draw on Jaques Ranciere’s argument of disagreement that agreement without imagination is also disagreement in which Rasdjamrearnsook’s collaborations with dead bodies are not a reaction against social regulation, Chanrochanakit argues, but complicatedly disguised as art and aesthetics. Her art objects—the dead bodies or what she calls the female landscape—could be read as counter-information to the Siamese diorama, i.e., an act of resistance from the morgue.

Ticket Information
FREE

Event Sponsor
Center for Southeast Asian Studies

More Information
Paul Rausch, 956-2688, cseas@hawaii.edu

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