Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

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The Class is a video work in which Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook lectures corpses about death in what seems to be a kind of classroom. It was filmed in an actual hospital morgue in Chiang Mai, with unclaimed dead bodies playing the role of the six "students" in the class. The work is a performance in which the artist tries to understand death by lecturing the dead about death, with the lecture offering various definitions of death from different perspectives. Araya at times talks directly to the cadavers, encouraging them to share their own views and experiences, and communicating with them in the same way she would with living people. This attitude demonstrates her attempt to confront something that society has overlooked as well as social taboos and cultural discrimination, and the religious and cultural values that involve death.

The film is shot inside a prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of its single tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons's work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women - including Araya herself - all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. A figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids.