Co-Lapses (Refuge Shanghai Iteration 2025)
Presented at Arte Laguna Shanghai 20th Edition (China)
CO-Lapses (Refuge 2025 – Shanghai Iteration)
Presented at the 20th Edition of the Arte Laguna Prize in Shanghai, CO-Lapses (Refuge 2025 Iteration) extends Karma Barnes’ ongoing exploration of material memory, ecological interconnection and transformation across time. This iteration takes the form of a refuge — an immersive environment that navigates terrain, obstacles and imagined mountains, seeking to transmute and harmonise connections between people, places and cultures. Through earth pigments, geological process and embodied materiality, the work reflects on collapse and regeneration, mapping cycles of change and resilience that bridge the human and more-than-human world.
Installed within EKA–Tianwu, a newly reimagined cultural hub in Jinqiao, Pudong, CO-Lapses resonates with the architecture’s spirit of renewal. Once a 100-year-old factory founded by the 1869 Pudong Customs Factory, the site has been transformed into what has been described as an “open-air architectural museum” — a project encompassing over 40 000 square metres, with 1 500 square metres dedicated to Arte Laguna Prize artists. Now operated by Jiayun Investment, EKA-Tianwu unites Exploration, Knowledge and Aesthetics, its Sanskrit-derived name EKA meaning “one” or “unknown element.” The project’s vision is to restore harmony between humanity and nature, where “beauty coexists and each has its own beauty.”
Within this context, CO-Lapses inhabits the language of renewal central to EKA’s architectural philosophy — where space, matter and time converge in dialogue. The installation reflects on the possibility of re-imagining coexistence through art, tracing the fluid exchanges between the built and natural environment, and between the local and the global.
The Arte Laguna Prize – Shanghai 2025 exhibition, held from November 1 to December 15 at EKA–Tianwu (535 Jinqiao Lu, near Zhonghuan Lu, Pudong District – Shanghai / 金桥路 535 号，近 中环路), marks a significant milestone — two decades of the Arte Laguna Prize’s commitment to international contemporary art. Bringing together more than 100 artists selected from across the past twenty years, the exhibition celebrates material experimentation, cultural diversity and artistic dialogue beyond borders.
