Rea Wibowo doesn't sell paintings. Her practice, for the last six years, has been building temporary rooms — suspended fabric, contact-mic'd objects, low fog and directional light — that exist for the run of a show and are then dismantled entirely, with only documentation left behind.
MAT: Your last three shows sold out their opening nights within a day. Does an audience change how you design a piece? Rea: 'Completely. I stopped thinking about a single viewer standing in front of a work and started thinking about forty people moving through a room at the same time, and where their bodies would end up blocking each other. That's not a problem to solve, it's part of the material now.'
“A painting asks you to look at it. An installation asks what you're going to do with your body.”
She traces the shift back to a residency where the gallery only offered her a hallway, not a room, and she found the constraint clarifying rather than limiting — forcing the work into a single line of movement taught her more about pacing than any square room had.
Asked about permanence, Rea is unsentimental: 'Everything I build gets thrown away within a week. I used to find that sad. Now I think it's the most honest thing about the work — you were there, or you weren't, and the photographs are just evidence, not the thing itself.'
Her next project, still unannounced publicly, involves a space with no fixed entrance — visitors will each be let in from a different point, meaning no two people will experience the piece in the same order. 'I want the show to be un-summarisable,' she says. 'If you can describe it fully to a friend, I didn't do my job.'
