Taking Time Exhibition

Client:

Museum of Discovery, MOD.

Taking Time is an immersive mini exhibition by Kat Bell—Gudjal and Girramay artist, curator, and PhD candidate—presented at MOD. (Museum of Discovery), Adelaide, from 8–12 July 2025. Created as part of Bell’s practice led PhD research, the exhibition invites visitors to slow down, listen deeply, and reconnect with stories, culture, and time.
Blending First Nations storytelling with augmented reality, moving image, and interactive digital landscapes, Taking Time explores how stories from the past, present, and future coexist and move through us. Audiences step into a shifting digital environment responsive to their own movement, embodying the living relationship between people, Country, and ancestral memory. Visitors engage with silent visual narratives that encourage personal interpretation, reflection, and emotional connection, while AR activated artefacts deepen encounters with cultural symbolism and Indigenous knowledge.
The exhibition draws inspiration from MOD.’s Forever exhibition—which considers our perception of time—and the 2025 NAIDOC theme “The Next Generation: Strength, Vision, Legacy.” Through these lenses, Taking Time becomes both a contemplative space and a future focused experiment in Indigenous led digital storytelling. It serves as a prototype within Bell’s broader research into culturally grounded, relational, and sovereign approaches to immersive media.
A central component of the exhibition is the Birrala Nyina Sessions (“sit and listen deeply”), welcoming visitors into open conversation, shared reflection, and community centred storytelling. These sessions embody Bell’s relational methodology, offering a culturally safe space for dialogue about the stories, inspirations, and protocols within the work.
Through its combination of sensory immersion, cultural grounding, and reflective engagement, Taking Time creates an atmosphere of slow attention and deep listening—an invitation to pause and consider how stories shape us, and how we carry them across time.

Year:

2025