Collectivism

Overview

Working across the fields of art, design and architecture, Rain Wu’s practice often involves interactive spatial experiences. She frequently collaborates with Eric Chen, scholar and principal architect of ArchiBlur Lab, to produce projects that explore the relationship between bodies and landscapes.

For the site-specific installation Collectivism (2017), Chen and Wu develop an approach to architecture that takes inspiration from the symbiotic systems in the human body. The installation is comprised of 600 police shields that enclose a garden. These planes of bulletproof material are anchored to a steel structure that constitutes an interior space populated by plants indigenous to the Emirates. As a unit of construction, the shields bring to mind a human scale, and their collective arrangement suggests cumulative forces beyond that of an individual. Reflecting the artists’ particular interest in architecture, the work offers an exploration of ordered and organic forms in the context of recent civil protest and calls for solidarity that are sweeping the globe.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 13.