Cell Project Space

Fortunate is a major solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Ruoru Mou, presenting a large-scale installation environment. For her most ambitious project to date, the artist reappropriates industrial forms, cinematic tropes, bureaucratic residue and manufacturing waste to address the material politics of luxury fashion, circulation, the optics of value, and regulatory subjectivity.

 

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, Mou’s current research draws on two industries that informed her upbringing in Tuscany: Chinese restaurants, including one opened by her grandfather, and Chinese-owned leather goods suppliers producing for luxury brands, a major source of local employment in the region.

 

In Fortunate, the factory is both subject and method, an ongoing cycle of casting, pressing, shrinking, shredding, reshaping and re-valuing that mirrors the rhythms of industrial labour and regulation. Central to Mou’s process is the reuse of ‘skins’ — material and symbolic layers reprocessed from earlier works, which gather into identifications and protective projections, transforming the body in ways required but not necessarily wanted. In her work, methods of preservation echo the sustaining and exhausting measures that keep bodies and materials in circulation.

 

Producing material and optical ambiguity, the exhibition works with the protocols and tropes that organise political and economic livelihoods, asking who holds the right to enter and exit, how much time it takes to wear a body down, and how one might preserve life. Fortunate works through the ‘impurities’ embedded within systems of production, distribution and classification, taking their contingency as its critical framework.



 

Curator Adomas Narkevičius

For all press and access related inquiries, please contact Annabelle Mödlinger, annabelle[at]cellprojects[dot]org.

 

With generous support from Henry Moore Foundation, Cockayne Foundation and The Elephant Trust.