The thing about most art exhibitions is that you think you know how to move through them. You walk in, look at the work, read the text accompanying it, take a step back and look again, maybe click a picture, and move to the next room. It is a pattern most of us follow on cue. And if I am being honest, it is not all that different from the way we move through most things now.
Second Nature, the new immersive exhibition at the Art House at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), is not built for that kind of viewing. In fact, quite the opposite.
Spread across four floors, the eight large-scale immersive artworks invite you to step right into them. You are meant to stand at the centre of the art, feel it, listen to it, gawk at it, and of course, click a few videos for posterity. But beneath all the tech-powered spectacle that Superblue, the Miami York-based immersive art centre, has brought for its India debut, the exhibition asks you to pause and slow down via digital screens, dark rooms with reflective floors, and rhinestone wallpapers even.
If you’ve been to teamLab Borderless, the buzzy art space in Tokyo, you’ll know the level of technological gadgetry we are talking about. Second Nature (which also features teamLab among other digital art powerhouses) does this through a stream of artworks that play with mirrors, pixels and lights as you circle through the gallery space. It begs you to look at what happens when the technologies we use every day begin to shape the way we look, move, feel and respond to the natural world. Walk around and you will see your art-worthy reflection based on a computer program that responds to the environment in real time or flowers that bloom and wither beneath your feet. Spend enough time with the works and one of them will leave you with a surprise to take home.
Opening today, Second Nature brings together works by Random International, teamLab, AA Murakami, Simon Heijdens, and Es Devlin, all being presented in India for the first time. Curated by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and Margot Mottaz, the exhibition looks at the relationship between humans, technology, and nature. In a city where most people are always on the way somewhere, slowing down is not exactly second nature. Scrolling, filming, and interacting with screens, though, is. Second Nature brings these realities together.
Here, a glimpse of what to expect from each of the eight installations:
Random International
The first work you will encounter is Random International’s ‘Future Self’, an installation that reflects you back through thousands of tiny points of light. But the image does not appear instantly. Raise a hand, lean on one side, do a little jig, and watch as the work slowly reads you. Spend a few extra minutes here and you start noticing things you usually never think about—the way you stand, how your weight shifts, the small gestures you make when you know you are being watched. Everything.
The rest of the floor continues that feeling. In ‘Audience’, 64 small mirrors, guided by motion sensors and cameras, follow you, like paps on a mission. Amusing at first, it quickly gets slightly unsettling because the work gives you nowhere to hide. ‘Presence and Erasure’ is even more direct. It scans for faces, photographs them, projects them large onto the wall, and then slowly lets the image disappear.
None of this feels futuristic in the way you might expect. Cameras already recognise us, phones already track our faces. Screens already show us versions of ourselves every day. Random International just breaks all that down enough for you to notice it. You see yourself as light, then as a reflection multiplied across mirrors, and finally as a face that appears for a minute and disappears.
teamLab
While Random International’s artworks make you aware of being seen, on the second floor teamLab makes you aware of how quickly everything around you can change. In ‘Flowers and People’, you see that instantly. A digital garden at first, it slowly becomes about control, attention, and how lightly we move through the world. Stand close to it for a couple of minutes, flowers will gather at your feet. Touch the screen, and you will see them wither. Generated in real time, the flowers you see one moment will never appear in exactly the same way again. Every moment in the room exists once, then disappears.
This is probably the most recognisable teamLab art there is. ‘Resonating Microcosms -Solidified Light’ gives the idea of connection a physical ovoid shape. Push or move one hard enough and, in a chain reaction across the room, ovoids around it light up. The room keeps showing you how nothing here exists entirely on its own. Your body, someone else’s movement, the sculpture, the light, the sound...all of it becomes part of the same responsive field.
The third teamLab exhibit on the floor, ‘Nirvana: Fleeting Flowers, Radiance Within’, is inspired by the screen paintings of 18th-century Japanese artist Itō Jakuchū, whose birds, animals, and flowers were built from thousands of tiny squares of colour. Knowing that helps, because your first instinct might simply be “pretty”. The video is projected on a rhinestone wallpaper with all its sparkle, pixels and flowers breaking into tiny points of light.
Walk closer and the tiny squares begin to appear. Step back and they gather into flowers again. teamLab takes Jakuchū's way of seeing and turns it into something you can walk through. The image changes with your movement, your distance, your touch, and even the people around you. The flowers are always blooming, scattering, fading. Touch one and it falls apart. Touch enough of them and that part of the screen starts to disappear.
AA Murakami and Simon Heijdens
On the third floor, AA Murakami’s ‘New Spring’ is the first work you see. Inspired by the brief, almost ceremonial beauty of sakura, the multi-sensory experience is built around a single tree-like sculpture that releases mist-filled blossoms off its ‘branches’ that disappear on contact with skin. You want to reach for them, like those snowflakes or bubbles you want to catch, because they look delicate and beautiful. It turns spring into something physical (and soapy hands if you stay at it). You wait, watch, reach, and let go. Pro tip: Wear a knitted blouse and see these bubbles bounce off you.
Simon Heijdens’s ‘Lightweeds’, his signature work developed over the past 15 years, brings the weather outside into the gallery. The work is a projection of oak trees across four walls that uses real-time data from sensors inside and outside the building. Rain, sunshine, and wind decide how the plants appear and move. So does the footfall inside. It apes nature and when people pass by trees sway and seeds are carried in the direction they walk. A plant grows here, fades there, takes root somewhere else. In a city where nature is often planned, controlled or pushed out of sight, ‘Lightweeds’ brings a bit of nature within.
Es Devlin
On the fourth and last floor, the exhibition ends with British artist and stage designer EsDevlin, whose work has included large-scale stage designs for Beyoncé, Bad Bunny, and The Weeknd. For Second Nature, Devlin presents ‘Screenshare’, a work built around a monumental screen made from 365 physical sketchbooks. These books carry drawings, notes, and traces of her thoughts and works from the past 25 years. On them, a film plays with Vietnamese dancer Dam Van Huynh performing alongside a recording of his younger self from almost 20 years ago. You stand there watching someone share space with a past version of their own body.
And the surprise we mentioned? If you wait until the end of the sequence, you are invited to walk up and take a sketch off the screen home with you. So, the installation slowly comes apart, page by page, and Devlin’s archive begins to leave with different people. By the time you walk out, the work has already started living elsewhere.
Second Nature is on at Art House, NMACC, till January 10, 2027
