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RANDOM INTERNATIONAL’s monumental artwork, Rain Room, will make its Southern Hemisphere debut in Melbourne, Australia, having captivated over half a million patrons worldwide. Rain Room will premiere in August 2019 and tickets will be available for purchase from Thursday 4 July 2019.

A 100 square metre field of continuous rainfall, Rain Room is a responsive environment engaging all the senses; millions of water droplets respond to your presence by ceasing to fall wherever movement is detected, allowing you 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 environment. The installation also seeks to explore how human relationships to each other and nature are increasingly mediated through technology.

Housed in a purpose-built 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 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,” says 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.”

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. 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. 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.” says Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass of Random International.

Rain Room has previously exhibited at 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).

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 viajackalopehotels.com/art/rainroom 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 Years Day.