Victoria Art & Culture
The Immersive Rain Room is Coming to Melbourne
A 100 square metre field of continuous rainfall, Rain Room engages all the senses and inspires discourse among its guests
A 100-square-metre field of continuous rainfall, Rain Room engages all the senses
Random International’s monumental artwork, Rain Room, will make its Southern Hemisphere debut in Melbourne this August. Rain Room is a responsive environment, where millions of water droplets respond to guests’ presence by ceasing to fall wherever movement is detected, allowing those inside to be fully immersed in the rain while simultaneously protected from it.
Internationally acclaimed as ‘strikingly beautiful’, Rain Room is a physical experience that both deprives and intensifies the senses. It invites an exploration of the individual actions and emotions that can be generated by this unique, counter-intuitive space. The installation also seeks to explore how human relationships with each other and nature are increasingly mediated through technology.
Housed in a purpose-built, pop-up pavilion by March Studio, Rain Room is a permanent part of the Jackalope Art Collection. An ethereal architectural statement, the ‘Jackalope Pavilion’ is a creative and artistic space, through which Mornington Peninsula boutique, design hotel Jackalope, can showcase public art and activations in an urban context.
“Art is a significant part of Jackalope’s undertaking to provide transformative and immersive experiences,” said Jackalope founder, Louis Li. “Rain Room is our most ambitious curation to date; the work represents the spirit of our hotels – an interplay between imagination, mystery and science.”
Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass of Random International added: “Rain Room can be seen as an amplified representation of self-created environments. It’s an artwork that you inhabit, and as such, it can elicit any number of different socio-behavioural dynamics. Each iteration of the work has been altered in some intangible way by the space and context in which it has been shown, whether through the scent of the water, the fabric of the architecture, or the behaviour of the public.”
Rain Room has previously exhibited in famous locations such as The Barbican, London (2012); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); the YUZ Foundation, Shanghai (2015); the LACMA, Los Angeles (2017); and at the Sharjah Art Foundation (2017). In Australia, Rain Room will be presented in association with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Koch and Ortkrass are optimistic about how Rain Room will be received in Victoria. “From rainy London to drought-ridden LA, to the heat of Sharjah, the surrounding climate opens up different perceptions of Rain Room and room for discourse,” they added. “We’re excited to see how the work resonates on the other side of the world, in the Southern Hemisphere, and in the city of Melbourne.”
Rain Room will be housed within the Jackalope Pavilion on the corner of Acland and Jackson Street, St Kilda. Tickets will be on sale from Thursday 4 July 2019 for an August 2019 – end of Summer 2020 season. Rain Room is open seven days a week, Sunday to Wednesday from 10am-6pm and Thursday to Saturday from 10am-9pm. The installation will be closed Christmas Day and New Year’s Day.
Tickets available at jackalopehotels.com
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