Award-winning GONDWANA VR exhibition transforms SA Museum during Adelaide Festival

As part of the 2024 Adelaide Festival and for the first time in its 167-year history, the South Australian Museum opened up its North Terrace exhibition space for 48 continuous hours allowing visitors to experience an immersive tribute to the World Heritage-listed Daintree tropical rainforest.

From 5pm Friday 8th March to 5pm Sunday 10th March, festivalgoers were able to experience the Daintree tropical rainforest tribute at all hours of the day and night in a special final week showing of the Museum’s summer exhibition GONDWANA VR: The Exhibition.

The Museum also hosted a rolling program of free and ticketed family-friendly events across the 48-hour-weekend, from meditation and yoga sessions to film screenings, hands-on paint and sip workshops, and floor talks from speakers including GONDWANA VR filmmaker Ben Joseph Andrews, and South Australia’s Chief Public Health Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier.

Inspired by the 180-milllion-year-old Daintree and Wet Tropics, GONDWANA VR featured an open-play virtual rainforest that condenses a century of change into a daily cycle from 1990 to 2090 informed by climate data projections and how audiences engage with the forest.

Visitors slipped on a VR headset or explored a multi-sensory installation that expands the rainforest beyond the goggles through projection, lighting, cinematic sound, and objects from the Museum’s historic Natural Science collections.

Created by Andrews and Emma Roberts, the award-winning GONDWANA VR has previously screened at SXSW, Sundance Film Festival, Melbourne International Film Festival and CPH:DOX in Copenhagen before premiering at the South Australian Museum in December.

For more information visit samuseum.sa.gov.au   

Images from top: GONDWANA VR audience; Grounded Yoga at GONDWANA VR The Exhibition lr; GONDWANA VR The Exhibition installation view Credit: Angus Northeast;