Invisible Exhibition: could Darkness open your eyes?

Get to know this interactive journey into an invisible world, where touch, sound and scent help one see.

Moving around your house, paying for coffee at a bar, escaping from the urban hustle. Everyday scenes we rely on vision to perform. But, what if we turned the lights off for a moment and tried to perceive the world with our other senses? That is exactly Invisible Exhibition Warsaw’s challenge. The museum takes visitors to an incredible journey into the invisible world, with the help of blind or visually impaired guides.

In an interactive pitch-black series of rooms that emulates real-life situations, like a visit to an art gallery, they acquire information through touch, hearing and smell, and sense of balance, and find their way into darkness. To enter those rooms, people have to complete minor tasks first, such as tapping on a Braille typewriter, testing out kitchen gadgets for the blind, and trying to solve simple puzzles while wearing a blindfold. The purpose of the visit is to make us reflect on the difficulties faced by the sightless and understand how they “see” the world, which, even in the darkness, can be beautiful and full of “light”.

In other words, Invisible Exhibition hopes that an hour of darkness may be an eye-opening experience that will have people thinking about a gift most take for granted. The successful concept was first launched in Budapest, in 2007, followed by Warsaw and Prague, in 2011 and it has been entertaining thousands of visitors in Stockholm since 2016 as well.