David Bowie fans can soon “turn and face the strange” at a mind-bending new immersive exhibit that embodies the ch-ch-changes of the legendary rocker’s career.
The expansive Bowie retrospective is slated for Lightroom, the same artist-led London venue that hosted David Hockney’s Bigger & Closer, the Tom Hanks-narrated lunar documentary The Moonwalkers, and Vogue: Inventing the Runway. But Lightroom’s visual wizards are now celebrating everyone’s favorite art-rock icon with a new multimedia production, David Bowie: You’re Not Alone, and Maxim can reveal a video sneak peek.
The career-spanning, 360-degree retrospective aims to bring audiences face-to-face with Bowie’s greatest musical moments, from “Space Oddity” to his final studio album, 2016’s Blackstar. Directed by Mark Grimmer and Tom Wexler of 59 Productions, the show goes beyond signature personas Ziggy Stardust, The Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, and the “Let’s Dance” crooner to focus on Bowie’s incalculable cultural impact, most recently spotlighted in Brett Morgen’s stellar 2022 documentary, Moonage Daydream.
The show is structured in thematic chapters covering spirituality, songwriting, and the “transformative power of creativity.” Highlights include a reconstructed digital set of Bowie’s 1974 Diamond Dogs tour and his infamous 1975 interview with British TV presenter Russell Harty. The accompanying audio has also been reconfigured for Lightroom’s spatial sound system by Gareth Fry, the Tony Award-winning sound designer behind Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
Fully authorized by The David Bowie Estate, the experience runs from April 22 through June 28. Utilizing Bowie’s own voice as the sole narrator, the production draws from thousands of previously unheard hours of material from the David Bowie Archive in New York, including never-before-seen film and personal notes.
“Lightroom offers an incredible opportunity to step inside an artist’s imagination and creative universe—weaving film, photography, animation, text and music into a story that can only be experienced in this space,” David Sabel, Executive Producer at Lightroom, said in a statement announcing the show. “To spend time in his world as it comes to life around you and to travel back and forth across the decades of astonishing performances, whether reliving them or experiencing them for the first time, is a total thrill.”
Mark Grimmer, who also wrote and directed Lightroom’s David Hockney: Bigger & Closer, suggested that the show seeks to dismantle the “alien” myth often associated with the shape-shifting pop icon.
“It says something about our relationship with artistic heroes that we’re drawn to mystery, otherness, the alien…In Bowie’s case, this is our construct, not his. Throughout his career, Bowie repeatedly resisted being figured as anything but human. Rather than undermining his mystique, we designed a show to celebrate Bowie as a champion of human creativity—focusing on the message he expressed time and again: that art, in all its forms, is our best hope for understanding what it means to be alive.”
Check out a first look video of David Bowie: You’re Not Alone below.
