Virtual Reality Art Gallery, 2024
Exquisite Mortality
Curator & Developer Diane Akpovwa
This experience starts in a small enclosed space filled with fire.
The walls hold traditional artworks from Gustav Klimt's "Death and Life" and Picasso's "The Old Guitarist," while a eulogy read by contemporary poet Rukevwe Aror permeates the air.
With borrowed motifs from Jenny Holzer's Truisms, the experience is designed to promote self-reflection by walking through text in liminal space, interlaced with traditional artworks and soundscapes.
By playing with scale and proximity, this experience was designed for contemplative meditation in human surrender.
The first half of the exhibit concludes with a large Augmented Reality sculpture developed by me titled Alive.
Attendees were asked to study their internal worlds as they witnessed this large, fleshy offering of life towering over them.
Attendees are then asked, in surrender, to walk through the fire as an act of faith.
Met with rich greens and the beautifully mundane, this section is interlaced with traditional and contemporary artworks to deepen conversations surrounding one's relationship to life, death, and ultimately rebirth.
Finally, the audience is asked:
When do you Feel Most Alive?