Holograms let museums exhibit what a vitrine cannot: fragile originals kept in reserve, lost works, invisible layers, living context. Enclosed formats like the HoloBox integrate into gallery scenography with no structural work, run for months, and have now carried two national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, in 2024 and 2025.
For the 2024 Art Biennale in Venice, the Swiss Pavilion trusted a holographic installation with one of the most scrutinized artistic briefs in the world. One year later, the Moroccan Pavilion did the same at the Architecture Biennale.
Two consecutive editions, two national pavilions, one supplier. Holovisio, the company behind hologramme.co, operated both, and this guide condenses what those runs taught us into the questions curators and exhibition designers actually ask.
A scope note first: our article on holograms in art looks at the medium from the artists' side. This one takes the institution's side: formats, constraints, and what a months-long public run really requires.
What a hologram lets you exhibit that a vitrine cannot?
The strongest curatorial case is not spectacle. It is access: a hologram puts in front of visitors what the collection cannot physically show, without moving a single accession number.
• Fragile originals. The object stays in climate-controlled reserve while an animated, life-scale double meets the public, rotating, opening, or dissolving into its own restoration layers.
• Lost and displaced works. Destroyed pieces, repatriated objects and items on loan elsewhere can hold their place in the narrative at full presence rather than as a wall label.
• The invisible. Underdrawings, construction techniques, interior mechanisms and archaeological strata become visible in sequence, in the gallery, next to the real thing.
• Living context. Craft, ritual and performance can inhabit the exhibition: the Moroccan Pavilion in Venice projected artisans at work across a facade of luminous propellers, memory and modernity on the same wall.
• The next audience. Museums courting younger visitors meet them on familiar ground: at the 2024 Biennale, 30 percent of the 700,000 visitors were under 26, and immersive rooms are consistently where they linger.
Which holographic format fits which exhibition space?
Format choice is a scenography decision before it is a technical one. Four families cover most museum briefs, and each reads differently in a gallery; the HoloBox by Holovisio, whose glazed case reads as museum furniture, is the most requested for object galleries. Formats also combine along a single route: a pyramid in the treasury, a wall in the immersive room, a glazed case at the entrance, each holding its own register.
The six constraints curators raise first
Every institutional conversation lands on the same six subjects. All of them have clean answers when they are planned at the design stage rather than at delivery.
• Light discipline. Holographic displays thrive in the dim conditions conservation already imposes: the darker the room, the stronger the image. Enclosed formats also hold up in daylight for atriums and street-facing spaces.
• Conservation and reversibility. Enclosed, screen-based units are self-contained, run on a standard outlet and require no structural fixing: the installation leaves no trace when the exhibition closes. Projection formats that share space with works are specified together with the conservation team.
• Visitor flow. A hologram creates a stopping point, so it is placed like one: 1.5 to 2 metres of standing zone, sightlines that do not block circulation, and a position in the route where a cluster of visitors helps the room rather than jams it.
• Sound. Silent galleries stay silent: content runs muted or enclosed formats are chosen where mechanical noise would intrude, and audio, when wanted, is directional.
• Access and languages. Content is a file, so language versions, subtitles and audio-described loops rotate on schedule, and the display itself needs no interaction to be understood.
• Historic buildings. Freestanding, self-powered units suit listed interiors: nothing is fixed into protected fabric, no rigging touches the ceiling, and the floor load stays within ordinary furniture range for standard configurations.
Venice, twice: what two national pavilions proved
In 2024, the Swiss Pavilion, under the aegis of Pro Helvetia, presented Super Superior Civilizations by the artist Guerreiro do Divino Amor: a dense, critical work on national mythologies, staged holographically inside one of the most rigorous institutional frameworks in the art world. The published brief was explicit: the technology serves the work, never the other way around.
The installation ran the full seven-month season of an edition that drew 700,000 visitors, 59 percent of them from abroad, according to La Biennale di Venezia. That is a museum-grade endurance test: daily public operation, international press, and an artwork whose credibility could not be dented by a technical incident.
In 2025, the Kingdom of Morocco answered the Architecture Biennale's theme on natural, artificial and collective intelligence with a double-sided wall: raw earthen materials, adobe, local stone and mud brick on one face, and on the other a luminous facade of 24 holographic propellers projecting Moroccan artisans at work. Public and critics received it as exactly the dialogue it staged: heritage and transmission, carried by a contemporary medium.
For a curator, the two projects answer the reliability question and the credibility question at once. The medium held a national pavilion's discourse for months, twice, in the most photographed exhibition context on earth.
What transfers to any institution is the method rather than the glamour: brief the device like a work, integrate it into the scenography from the first sketch, and plan the run like an operations schedule, with content updates and support scoped for the full season.
How a museum project runs, from loan to permanent gallery?
The process starts where it should: with the curatorial intent, not the hardware. Content is co-produced with the curators, the artists or the collection team, and the Studio by Holovisio handles the 3D production, so the files remain the institution's assets for future re-use.
Temporary exhibitions typically run on rental: delivery, installation, training and teardown are included, which keeps a three-month show light on the museum's own teams. Permanent galleries and long-term displays shift the logic to purchase, with maintenance and content updates planned across the life of the display.
Third-party benchmarks point to up to 50 percent more interaction time with the featured subject (figures vary by content and context), which in a museum translates into the metric every exhibition report cares about: dwell. Route completion and repeat visitation follow the same logic: measure the gallery before the install, then compare the season like for like.
On lead times, standard rentals book two to four weeks ahead; co-produced artistic or collection content extends the runway, and pavilion-scale projects are planned months out with the scenographer. The earlier the conversation starts, the more the technology disappears into the design.
For the artists' perspective on the medium, read our piece on holograms in art; the two articles are complements, not competitors. For practical sizing, the HoloBox space and installation guide gives the planning numbers, and the complete guide to holograms maps every device family. If the project tours, the same planning logic applies venue by venue, with the content travelling as files.
Holovisio, the company behind hologramme.co, designs, produces and operates holographic displays (fans, HoloBox, pyramids, walls, projections) for companies and institutions, from Mercedes-Benz to the Venice Biennale pavilions. Rental or purchase, 3D content included. Request a quote.
By the Holovisio team · hologramme.co
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