Revival Roadshow

In a speculative future, the appraisal of a mysterious artwork spirals into a surreal VR journey through fake news, rampant consumerism, pollution, and irreversible climate change - revealing how myths shape the stories we choose to believe.

Revival Roadshow (2025)

VR 3-DoF, 8K, 17:00, 4-channel interactive audio.

Screening: International Film Festival Rotterdam, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Into The Great Wide Open,
Netherlands Film Festival, DOK Leipzig and GIFF - Geneva International Film Festival

A 17th-century painting of the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman becomes the starting point for a darkly absurd vision of the future - one shaped by fake news, rampant consumerism, suffocating plastic pollution, and irreversible climate change. In Revival Roadshow, Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy weave together sharp critiques of media consumption, colonial legacies, and their continuing impact on a future that feels both speculative and alarmingly plausible.

Framed as a futuristic spin on an art appraisal show (imagine Antiques Roadshow gone off the rails), the work introduces a young woman who brings in a painting inherited from her grandmother. Sentimental value quickly gives way to financial desire when it turns out the work holds special significance: it depicts Abel Tasman, the 17th-century Dutch explorer known for being the first European to reach Tasmania and New Zealand, reanimated after a catastrophic flood has submerged large parts of the Netherlands. His new mission? To discover fresh land for a displaced Dutch population.

The viewer steps into a fictional museum where this alternative history begins to unfold, but there’s little time to engage. The show is frequently interrupted by pop-up advertisements, which dangle hollow promises of consumer comfort in the face of impending ecological disaster. Fehres and Conroy deliberately embrace these visual intrusions as familiar, absurd, and strikingly effective storytelling tools.

Revival Roadshow is built as a digital collage made from thousands of museum-like objects: paintings, Delftware, colonial maps, and botanical drawings. In a world where we’re overwhelmed by images every day, Fehres and Conroy use collage as a way to resist and reflect. As the piece develops, its dense, maximalists and layered world continues to grow. Stories overlap, points of view clash, and the viewer must decide: What do you focus on? What do you ignore? And what do those choices say about how you relate to the past, the present, and the future that barrels toward us—wrapped in an impenetrable, suffocating layer of plastic?

With its rich layers of meaning and imagery, Revival Roadshow challenges us: What stories do we hold onto? What are we willing to let go? And what do we choose to carry into the future?