The United Arab Emirates city of Sharjah is the first to house a permanent installation of Random International’s Rain Room (which was first shown at the Barbican Centre in London in 2012), after it was acquired by the Sharjah Art Foundation, The Art Newspaper reports. Since its first appearance in London, iterations of the installation have toured different cities around the world and become part of international collections including that of New York’s MoMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An edition that was recently bought by the founder of the Yuz Museum, Budi Tek, is currently on show at the Shanghai venue. Although Tek’s edition is significantly bigger than Sharjah’s (measuring around 150 sqm to the latter’s approximately 100 sqm), the edition made for Sharjah Art Foundation is the first to have a permanent exhibition venue, for which they specifically commissioned architect Mona El Mousfy to design a modernist building to house the Rain Room, located beside a park in the Al Majarrah district.
1 May 2018