Revealing Krishna: Immersive Digital Galleries

Meaningful innovation initiates relationships with artwork in Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain, on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art from November 14, 2021, through January 30, 2022.

Parts of the exhibition, Revealing Krishna, are on view at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art from April 30, 2022 - September 18, 2022.

Organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain presents the story, context, and new restoration of a masterwork in the museum’s collection through an integration of art, technology, and experiential design. . Through two sculptural and four digital galleries, Revealing Krishna transports visitors to the dramatic floodplains of southern Cambodia and tells the life story of the CMA’s monumental sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan, spanning 1,500 years and three continents. The 1,500-year-old stone sculpture from Cambodia, larger than life size, depicts the young Hindu god in the superhuman act of shielding his people from destruction.

The opening gallery transports visitors along a canal passage to the small twin-peaked mountain of Phnom Da where the Cleveland Krishna was found. Immersive projections on three walls and a soundscape recorded in Cambodia create a cinematic experience of the landscape where the sculpture was made. The first sculpture gallery presents art from the ancient city adjacent to Krishna’s sacred mountain, called Angkor Borei, or “Capital City,” in the Khmer language.

The global story of the sculpture unfolds in a mixed-reality tour spanning 15 centuries and three continents. Visitors wearing HoloLens 2 headsets see high-resolution 3-D holographic projections of sculptural pieces accompanied by spatial audio and narration as they experience the myth of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhan and come to understand the sculpture’s history. The tour culminates in a life-size holographic projection of the cave temple on Phnom Da where the Cleveland Krishna appears to have stood. Visitors enter the sanctuary to find an artist’s re-creation of the sculpture showing Krishna supporting the mountain in which he stands.

Visitors then travel to the next gallery, where they see the newly restored Krishna sculptures, both from Cleveland and Phnom Penh, on view together for the first time. Accompanying them are three other large-scale early stone sculptures found on or near Phnom Da.

All eight gods from Phnom Da are reunited digitally in the next gallery in elegant, interactive projections. Created from a combination of photogrammetry and LiDAR scanning of the sculptures, 3-D models of the eight magnificent images are projected on individual scrims to be seen together at life-size scale as never before. In the final gallery of the exhibition, wrapping across two walls, archival photographs of the eight sculptures interface with historical images, present-day footage, and animated maps to illustrate the importance of open dialogue and mutual sharing of resources in the preservation of cultural heritage.