Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook took a break from communing with the dead last week to instead speak with the insane. "Great Times Message: Storytellers of the Town" at Bangkok's 100 Tonson Gallery had no corpses. In their place were 10 women who live at a psychiatric hospital, each one telling her story.

Their identities were deliberately blurred in the five concurrent video streams, and the overlapping histories were difficult to follow, though the English subtitles helped some viewers.

With their doctors' permission, the patients were posed in the same position in a chair and asked to explain how they came to be residents of "the fool's house".

"I've read the French philosopher Michael Foucault, who says humanity's four main activities are language, entertainment, sex and money," Araya said.

"I was curious about the mentally unbalanced, who can't express themselves in normal fashion in language, finances, sex or entertainment. So I tried to connect them with the general public."

The Chiang Mai-based artist said she believed the women were happy someone was listening to them, even if it was just for 10 minutes.

"I found that the human being is a fragile thing."

Over the past six years Araya has earned international praise for her videos about consoling the bereaved and communing with the deceased.

She's read poems to the white-shrouded corpses of people who had no living survivors - no one to pray for their easy transition to the next life - in the belief art has the power to fill that gap. Araya dressed the mortal remains in colourful outfits and discussed with them the topic of death.

These video works, controversial because they straddled the line of individual privacy and dignity, were displayed in the Thai pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale, together with the installation art of the late Montien Boonma, which was designed to heal and facilitate escape from death.

"I know I'll be questioned again," she said of the videos from the mental institute. "My art objects here are human beings too, and in their weakest state. But I have to be strong if I'm to challenge a society that gives top priority to fun. My work has to be controversial if I'm to play with topics most people want to avoid. It's a rocky path."

Araya felt it was unfair to explore the personal lives of other people without divulging something of her own. So this 49-year-old single woman offered three chapters from her own life.

The first, "Faeces, Life, Love, Lust", depicted her daily routine, much of which involves cleaning up after the seven stray dogs she's adopted. Then one day she escaped to the Rayong seaside with one of her dogs.

The video showed Araya and her pooch walking on the beach, sleeping and dreaming, in her case, about intimacy and in the dog's case, about being served a sumptuous feast of fine food and wine.

"The woman dreams of naked bodies," her narration explained, "parts that are defective in herself, part that she lacks. She dreams long enough to compensate for what she lacks in real life.

"The female dog dreams of a large, luxurious dinner for such a long time that its belly almost bursts, in spite of the fact that's only a dream."

The second autobiographical tale, "The Nine-Day Pregnancy of a Single, Middle-Aged Associate Professor", recounted her 2003 experiment in which she convinced her friends and acquaintances that she was pregnant when she returned home after several months in Germany.

"What would it be like for a single woman who lives with dogs and is at an age when pregnancy is no longer desirable?" she asked.

"Most of the women congratulated me, while the men wore puzzled expressions. When I revealed that it was just a performance, the reactions ranged from refusing to talk to me and wearing black as a token of protest, to objecting that pregnancy isn't something to play games with.

"One year later, I came to Bangkok and a former scholastic adviser asked about my baby. I'd already forgotten about my performance, but one of my artist friends had spread the news. All of these reactions confirm that 'being pregnant', even though it's a private matter, is incorporated into public life."

In "The Crying of the Earth", musicians play "ghost lullabies" on a flute, viola and fiddle in a cemetery. The music, she said, would bring peace to the souls hadn't yet been reborn.

In her current project, Araya is fully returning to the subject of death once more, documenting the fate of cattle in a slaughterhouse. Expect to see it at the International Art Festival in November, which is being organised by The Nation.

Araya's "video documents" of conversations with the dead are compiled along with her latest works in the book "Art and Words: Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook", published by Matichon. It's available for Bt240 at leading bookstores.

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit

The Nation