An immersive installation orients visitors to the objects and their origins

Night Kitchen collaborated with the Krannert Art Museum to produce an entrance experience for the travelling exhibition World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean. This immersive media project brings to life a historic trade map and artifacts from the collection, evoking a narrative that highlights the global connectivity of Eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean.

The projection begins and ends with the ocean's horizon. It explores a dynamic 3D animated map of the extensive trade routes throughout the Indian Ocean and the intercultural influences this trade produced on the arts and crafts of the region. It smoothly transitions through immersive visuals that evoke the setting, beginning with an endless blue horizon and resolving through levels of scale to show the port of Zanzibar, the furnishings of a Swahili household, and the jewelry adorning a Swahili woman. During interstitial moments, we draw connections between objects in the collection and their areas of cultural influence.

The far reaches of Swahili trade draw elements from Indian Ocean port towns, villages in Eastern and Central Africa, and distant cities in Europe, Asia and North America. By highlighting features of the artifacts and their associated cities on a geographic legend, we illustrate the confluence of cultural and aesthetic influence on commodities of trade, wealth and power.

World on the Horizon was featured on Art Open Journal.