Part Two

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook:
Textually

Curated by Nutdanai Songsriwilai
At 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok

Exhibition On View:
Part One: 16 October 2025 – 15 February 2026
Part Two: 21 February 2026 – 31 May 2026

 

‘To give new meaning to the old views, one may have to face the same old karma.’

Beginning with the first chapter, 100 Tonson Foundation presented “Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: The Old Same Karma,” co-organised with MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, and launched an online archive gathering nearly half a century of artistic works by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. Presented alongside were all her single-channel video works, marking the start of an ongoing archival project devoted to consolidating the artist’s extensive body of work. Continuing this trajectory, the second chapter, “Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Textually,” invites viewers to read Araya’s paradigm in her capacity as an author, as a writer—venturing into a landscape of letters dense with dialogues between Image and Utterance, Script and Remembrance, Experience and Taste of literature, Art and Words.

 

‘The novel of art, when art fills the novel, when death fills life.’

In 2017, 100 Tonson Gallery conceived, in collaboration with Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, the exhibition “An Artist is Trying to Return to 'Being a Writer’”, foregrounding her liminal stance between the role of “writer” and that of “artist.” Revisiting this gesture, “Textually,” is not only a continuation of Old Karma, but also a sequel to the 2017 exhibition that embodied the gesture of “Trying to,” by unfolding writings long completed in the past, unfastening them, and stitching them into outlines and notes she inscribed in the midst of working. At the opposite side of the room, the gesture of “Return to 'Being a Writer’” is made explicit through “another unfinished writing outlined as a novel, stiff and unyielding, halted entirely upon encountering a scene too beautiful to proceed.” These two currents are woven together with video works that carry her words in the voice of “An Artist,” drawing attention to Araya’s orthographic process—her insistence upon words, upon phrases, upon narration and text—reflecting her perspectives on memory, on dogs, on life, on death, and on art from another angle.

 

‘The beauty of a landscape resides in its melancholy.’

This exhibition also arose from conversations and guidance offered by Sayan Daengklom—lecturer, critic, scholar, and Araya’s “friend who was an Art historian.” Sharing a mutual interest in the trajectories of art, word, and literature, Sayan and Araya, together with 100 Tonson Foundation, invited over forty collaborators, scholars, curators, artists, and devoted readers of her prose to contribute passages of her words that continue to echo, prod, linger, or remain lodged in their memory. These fragments were rearranged into something akin to an unpolished long short story composed of her own words—an act of gathering and underscoring certain luminous facets of Araya’s selection of vocabulary and meaning.

 

‘…yet one hopes that the bruise from rereading will lead to some fragments of the days to come.’

Araya had pinned a long-form prolonged drama of letters as:

 

“The intermittent overlapping of time, of memory, of recollection, accumulates with the weight of thought and sentiment, weaving into words, into phrases, into sentences, pressing, circling, pausing, and morphing. A compound states that the controller is both absorbed within the mass and, at the same time, steps aside, glancing obliquely from a corner that has shifted greatly or just slightly. At times it seems repetition, at times a sudden reemergence, as though one passage were superimposed upon a paragraph left unfinished, while a voice from another word resonates faintly from afar (perhaps from the upper corner of an emptied wall), and then slowly draws nearer, as if magnifying letters, which blend and merge due to the space — the place that refuses displacement—and due to time of coexistence. And then we aloof as though the entirety were engraved elsewhere — within the site of exhibition. The visitors approach, lean in to read, and suddenly some words loom larger, pushing the arc of perception aside...”

 

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook: Textually has been made possible through the support and contributions of Sayan Daengklom, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Ek-Anong Phanachet, Suteera Bootaranark, Nutdanai Songsriwilai, Setapa Prom, Lalita Singkhampuk, Kittima Chareeprasit, and Supernormal Studio.