The Class (2005)

Handling

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.