Walking Through A Songline

About The Exhibition

Walking Through a Songline was a digital art installation hosted at the Museum of Goa from 14 March to 4 April 2025, showcasing the powerful intersection of ancient Australian First Nations storytelling and contemporary digital art.

At its heart is the Seven Sisters Songline, an epic narrative of seven women pursued across deserts and sky by a shape-shifting sorcerer. These journeys are remembered and passed down through Songlines, living maps that encode law, ceremony, culture, and geography into image, movement, and sound.

These Songlines are more than myth. They are a way of being in the world, still practiced and protected by Australia’s First Nations peoples. Much like Indigenous traditions in India, they represent memory embedded in land, told through generations without written language.

Through this exhibition, audiences were invited to walk alongside the story, feeling, listening, and participating in a cultural narrative that is both ancient and deeply relevant. The exhibition also invited us to ask: how do we preserve memory in a world that forgets fast? How do we listen to voices that were never written down? Because why it matters is not just a question of heritage, but of presence, preservation, and justice.

Exhibition Flow and Experience

The exhibition began with an exclusive evening on 13 March 2025, where personal oral histories from the visitors were shared in dialogue with the Songlines of Australia. Guests contributed to a collaborative glow-in-the-dark visual installation, mapping personal and ancestral stories. The evening was a gentle call to listen, to reflect, and to witness storytelling across time and culture.

Over the following weeks, the exhibition was open to the public, supported by daily programs, hands-on workshops, and interactive activities designed for all ages and abilities.

Interactive Gallery Experiences

Throughout the exhibition, visitors engaged with multisensory and participatory installations:

• Mark Your Journey on the Songlines Map
  Participants left glowing fingerprints on a large world map, marking places of personal or ancestral significance.
• Glow Wall and Takeaways
  Visitors created glow-in-the-dark creatures, mandalas, and decorated natural materials to either contribute to the growing Glow Wall of Collaboration or take home as souvenirs.
• Glow in the Dark Jenga
  Children who walked into the exhibition participated in building and playing with a co-created Jenga set inspired by nature and the glowing visual language of the exhibition.

Sunday Workshops

Creative workshops were held every Sunday, inviting children and families to explore the themes of journey, storytelling, nature, and constellations:

• Snail Trails and Tales
  Ages 5 to 8 | Inspired by the patterns of snail trails, this workshop introduced Songlines through visual storytelling and play.
• Movable Cardboard Constellations
  Participants crafted their own rotating constellations while discovering Indigenous interpretations of the night sky.
• Tapestry of Transformation
  Children painted symbols of land, water, and sky onto canvas strips, weaving them together to represent the interconnectedness of Songlines in nature.
• Inclusive Art Workshop for Persons with Disabilities
  This sensory-friendly session used felt, texture, and light to invite participants to create tactile artworks and mythical creatures, supported by assistive tools and guidance.

Presented by

This exhibition was hosted at the Museum of Goa in collaboration with the Australian Consulate-General, Mumbai, along with the National Museum of Australia and Mosster Studio, to promote cross-cultural storytelling.

Acknowledgements

Produced by:
National Museum of Australia
Mosster Studio

Presented in Goa by:
Australian Consulate General, Mumbai

Museum of Goa

With gratitude to:

Paul Murphy, Consul-General of the Australian Consulate-General in Mumbai, Christian Jack, Deputy Consul-General of the Australian Consulate-General in Mumbai, Aliya Elariss, Atreyee Chakravarty, Yuri Luikham, and all the museum educators, storytellers, children, and families who brought their light, time, and presence to this journey.