Water in never still: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook's sculptural and installation practice

This paper examines the early sculptural and installation practices of renowned Thai artist and writer, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957). Although most scholarly and curatorial attention has focused on Araya’s moving image works, particularly those that involve corpses, this paper moves towards one of the artist’s many beginnings. This gesture is not undertaken in the hope of developing a chronological account of Araya’s artistic development, but is instead an attempt to read her early three-dimensional works through insights gleaned from her later artistic and literary practice. Specifically, in examining Araya’s work from an inter-medial perspective, I apprehend how the production and reception of her sculptures and installations involve an interplay between moving and static bodies. As I argue, when understood in conjunction with the ways in which Araya’s oeuvre simultaneously invites and refuses feminist readings, these works provoke a reconsideration of questions of agency and impotence, and their assumed correspondence between action and inaction.