Marking the opening of The Bouquet and the Wreath, join us for an evening with acclaimed Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook. The programme begins with a reading-performance of Araya’s writings by multidisciplinary artist and writer Hussein Nassereddine. This will be followed by a conversation between the exhibition’s curators Kittima Chareeprasit and Roger Nelson, in dialogue with Lucas Morin, Senior Curator at Art Jameel.

Together, they will explore the poetic dimensions of Araya’s practice from her reflections on life, death, and ritual, to her long-standing engagement with women’s experiences, and the spiritual in everyday life.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (b. 1957, lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand) is an artist, writer and professor, and one of Southeast Asia’s most respected contemporary practitioners. Araya has also played a major role in innovating arts education in Thailand, where she established the country’s first interdisciplinary art school curricula. At her home and studio in Chiang Mai, she cares for dozens of stray dogs, who often appear in her artworks.

Roger Nelson is an art historian and curator, and Assistant Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia, and is currently working on a book about artistic art histories. He was previously a curator at National Gallery Singapore. He was the 2022 recipient of the A.L. Becker Southeast Asian Literature in Translation Prize, and co-editor of the first book-length translation of the artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s writing. He is co-founding co-editor of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, a scholarly journal published by NUS Press.

Kittima Chareeprasit is the chief curator at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai and MAIELIE Art Space in Khon Kaen, Thailand. Since 2016, she has co-founded the Waiting You Curator Lab, an experimental curatorial workshop and artists’ book publishing house. Her interests lie in contemporary art and culture, focusing on the socio-political history within the context of Southeast Asia.

Hussein Nassereddine is an artist living and working between Beirut and Paris. His work in installation, writing, video and performance originates from a practice around language that builds fragile monuments rooted in collective histories and resources of time, song, poetry, and ruins. His works, performances and texts have been presented in museums, biennales and institutions around the world, including the Beirut Art Center (solo exhibition – 2025), Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2024), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), Jameel Art Center (2022), MISC Athens (solo exhibition – 2021) among others. His first book How to see the palace pillars as if they were palm trees was published in Arabic in 2020 with Kayfa ta. The English translation was published in 2024.

Image: Two Planets: Millet’s The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers, 2008
Single-channel video, colour, sound
Thai with English subtitles, 14 min. 44 s.
Art Jameel Collection