Immersive Digital Art Exhibition 'Second Nature' Makes India Debut At Mumbai's NMACC
An immersive digital art exhibition titled 'Second Nature' has made its India debut at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre’s (NMACC) Art House in Mumbai. Running for six months during the monsoon season, the interactive showcase aims to shift the audience's role from passive spectators to active participants.
Created by Superblue, a Miami-based experiential art enterprise, the exhibition spans all four floors of the Art House. Inside, visitors can wander through forests of digital flowers, chase bubbles that pop into light, and watch their own shadows get swallowed and multiplied by the surrounding walls.
Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, the co-founder of Superblue, stated that the transition from spectator to participant is a key element of the showcase. Having spent decades in the traditional art world, including establishing Gagosian’s first London gallery and bringing contemporary art to Moscow through Garage, Dent-Brocklehurst observed that large-scale installations often struggle to fit into traditional museum rotations and gallery systems.
To address this, Superblue was co-founded in 2019 under a model that commissions large-scale experiential works, pays artists upfront, and shares ticket revenue with them. Dent-Brocklehurst compared this shift to the music industry's transition to public purchasing.
While some critics dismiss immersive exhibitions as simple backdrops for photographs, Superblue’s senior director of exhibitions, Margot Mottaz, defended the artistic value of the format. Mottaz explained that the exhibition is designed to create immediate emotional connections while offering deeper layers of meaning for those who stay longer.
The exhibition features collaborative works created by artists alongside engineers, programmers, architects, and musicians. Organizers hope the interactive nature of the installations will make contemporary art more accessible and less intimidating to the general public in Mumbai.
