Just days after Van Gogh Alive opened its doors, a second multi-sensory art experience is set to come to Canberra.
Van Gogh Alive producers, Grande Experiences and the National Museum of Australia are teaming up for an Indigenous art experience set to open on June 8.
Connection: Songlines from Australia's First Peoples in a spectacular immersive experience will take visitors on a journey of discovery across Australia, through sky, land and water Country.
Using the same technology as the Van Gogh Alive experience, Connection will feature more than 300 images from some 100 Indigenous artists, that will be paired with sound and an aroma.
"It has a relevant or appropriate connection to the way we traditionally passed on knowledge," National Museum lead Indigenous curator and guest curator on Connection, Margo Ngawa Neale said.
"We're a non-text-based culture so our way of passing on knowledge was through performance-based means - visual, aural, song and dance.
"The thing that's magical about this is that not only is it on one level of great magical experience in the digital domain, but it approximates how we used to pass our knowledge on in an animated fashion.
"And it's a digital experience that's going to a show more of our collection, more often, to more audiences, especially the younger generation who are a bit over going to stuffy old museums and galleries."
Several artworks were drawn from the National Museum's collection to feature as digital projections in the new experience, alongside artworks from other public, private and corporate collections. Included in the experience works from First Nations artists Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Albert Namatjira, Tommy Watson, Gabriella Possum, Anna Pitjara and Lin Onus.
"This doesn't replace objects and things, it's just a fantastic enhancement and a different experience that engages people in a more multi-sensory way and encourages them to then see more, read more," Ms Neale said.
"All you can come away with is a sense of the range and the diversity of artists. You don't know who's who or where they're from straight off in the experience, but you do come away with this overpowering sense of the enormous diversity there is across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia."
Even with some 100 artists included in Connection, the experience is just a sample of work created by First Nations artists. And while experience aimed to be as diverse as possible - both when it comes to the artists themselves, and the range in artwork origins - Ms Neale said it was impossible to include everything within the experience.
It's for this reason that she said "watch this space" when it comes to future art experiences showcasing Indigenous art.
As for the works that were chosen, they were done so with the help of the National Museum's Indigenous Reference Group, the deputy chair of which is John-Paul Janke.
"This experience is a great example of an exciting conjunction between First Nation's culture and communities and contemporary digital storytelling," he said.
"This show enables the museum to share our stories with wider audiences in a new and innovative way."
Connection: Songlines from Australia's First Peoples in a spectacular immersive experience opens at the National Museum on June 8 for a limited season.
For more information and tickets go to nma.gov.au.
