Overview

One of the most important pavilions at Expo 2020 Dubai is the Women’s Pavilion, a collaborative work of Expo and Cartier. The pavilion symbolizes women’s empowerment and gender equality. 

Considering how women were constantly misrepresented and neglected throughout human history, the exhibition is committed to representing all women, prominent and not widely known, who have played a significant role in history and continue to be inspiring figures in today’s world.

Main Theme

The main theme of the pavilion is “New Perspectives”. A journey of discovering women’s outstanding impact on the dream of creating a better world. The Women’s Pavilion’s goal is to inspire every visitor, shed light on the importance of women in the world, break stereotypes and misconceptions of women’s roles by stating the simple truth: “When women thrive, humanity thrives”. The exhibition will also show how gender equality and female empowerment were influenced by women and men.

The Experience

In the beginning, visitors are invited into an introductory room full of installations that metaphorically symbolize the pavilion of Women. The room is installed with a curved projection wall, which creates a pepper ghost effect for the performance.

The zone “Women in history” was arranged according to six key dates when women’s history was experiencing exceptionally strong resistance visually illustrated by six doors and a circular façade with the mosaic of 200 portraits of leading and less known women.

The next stop on the journey is the zone of “Education”, which is reflected in a design of a library. Guests will learn more about famous women in history. 

The shared theme of Education is sustainability. This fascinating space invites guests to engage with interactive panels to learn more about women with remarkable contributions to environmental and ecological causes. 

Finally, the most intimate and introspective space is the “Tribute room”. Here, visitors are presented with an opportunity to share the message with the rest of the world by writing a name of a woman he/she knows on the screen that will become a part of the constellation on the wall. 

Our Main Challenges

The main challenge that our team has encountered was the technical complexity involved in the concept design introduced by our clients, Expo and Cartier. Ensuring that coordination of different stakeholders to be perfectly executed to meet high expectations of our clients proved to be another challenge, which included audio designers, lighting designers, 3x project managers, and a project director. 

Such a highly sophisticated lighting system, like Dali, DMX, Artnet were to be an essential part of the performance that required exceptionally experienced professionals from over the world to handle this task. The issue with the lack of specialized experts to operate and install the equipment had to be solved under strict time constraints. 

Our Solutions

With the help of BeWunder’s large, dedicated team, we successfully managed to take on a high workload in a short timescale while maintaining effective coordination between all involved stakeholders. In addition, owing to improved turnaround time from our design team we succeeded in a decreased time of the final approval of the AV system design changes.

As a result of the comprehensive internal training at BeWunder, we were able to deploy specialized personnel to meet the challenge.

Photos: Andreas Keller