VR Gallery from Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramović and Anish Kapoor at ArtScience Museum

ArtScience Museum launches new permanent VR Gallery.  Located at Level 4 of the museum, the VR Gallery will open to the public starting July 10.  

The VR Gallery invites visitors to encounter unique immersive experiences from some of the world’s most renowned artists, museums and film festivals.  Opening as part of ArtScience Museum’s 10th anniversary program, the VR Gallery launches with a presentation of virtual reality artworks by three contemporary artists – Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramović and Anish Kapoor.  

Hyperrealities: Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor 

Headlining the launch of the VR Gallery is a program called Hyperrealities.  Hyperrealities is presented in collaboration with Acute Art, an organization that produces and exhibits compelling visual artworks that use virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality technologies. 

It brings visitors on a journey into the brilliant minds of three artists who have consistently pushed the boundaries of contemporary art practice. Olafur Eliasson, Marina Abramović and Anish Kapoor explore topics such as nature, climate change and the human body in their first forays into virtual reality. 

In his first virtual reality artwork, Eliasson generates a digital version of a natural phenomenon which he has been fascinated with throughout his art career. In Rainbow (2017), viewers enter an immersive environment and encounter a majestic curtain of falling water. They are invited to move through the water attempting to experience a rainbow. Just as a rainbow in nature only appears when light, water droplets, and the eye are in alignment, so Eliasson’s virtual rainbow can only be seen when the viewer’s movement produces a correlation between these three points. Its colored light slips in and out of view, responding to the viewer’s body as well as handheld controls, which allow direct interaction with droplets as they descend. 

Rainbow is a delightful, multi-sensory treat which allows viewers to virtually drench themselves in falling showers, listen to the gentle trickle of water, and admire colorful prisms of light. 

Marina Abramović is a pioneer of performance art. In Rising (2018), she masterfully interconnects art with activism in a virtual reality artwork that communicates the terrifying effects of climate change on sea levels. 

Wearing a VR headset, viewers enter an intimate virtual space, where they come face-to-face with the artist, who beckons from within a glass tank that is slowly filling with water. Visitors are invited to interact with Abramović, as the water level rises. 

Premiered at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2018, Rising urges viewers to reconsider their impact on the world around them, where seemingly simple decisions can mean life or death. 

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Into Yourself, Fall (2018), is his first VR artwork. It takes viewers on a journey through the human body, inviting the audience to experience the sensation of falling into oneself via a VR headset. 

Starting in a forest scene in a clearing surrounded by trees, viewers encounter a large black void in the ground. They then travel through a series of tunnels with walls that appear to be made of sinewy flesh and muscle. With a soundtrack created by the artist’s son, Ishan Kapoor, the artwork invites visitors to lose themselves in another realm. Into Yourself, Fall simulates the disorientating experience of vertigo during a celebration of the labyrinthian, majestic inner workings of the self. 

The artwork first premiered at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2018. 

Tickets and Reservations 

Tickets are available for purchase from July 1 at all Marina Bay Sands box offices and website. 

Guests are strongly encouraged to pre-purchase tickets online prior to their visit, due to limits in venue capacity and timed entry to the exhibition.