Starry nights, virtual lights: Van Gogh’s world goes digital in Istanbul

- Installations include holographic sunflowers, interactive puzzles and digital coloring activities inspired by Van Gogh’s paintings

- Van Gogh: Chasing the Light captures a broader cultural shift in Istanbul, where digital technology is redefining how art is displayed, felt and remembered

The yellow glow of sunflowers, the deep blue of starry skies, and Vincent van Gogh’s restless brushstrokes now surround visitors in Istanbul, inviting them to step inside the painter’s world rather than merely observe it.

Van Gogh: Chasing the Light, a sweeping digital exhibition at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Digital Experience Center, brings the Dutch painter’s world to life through immersive technology, transforming his story into a multisensory journey of color, sound and emotion.

Instead of traditional framed paintings, digital environments filled with shifting light, music and motion take visitors into the imagination of one of history’s most beloved artists.

Van Gogh, born in 1853 in the Netherlands, produced more than 2,000 artworks in just over a decade. Despite struggling with mental illness and poverty, he persevered and his work – though largely unrecognized during his lifetime – has had a profound influence on modern art.

- From pigments to pixels

The exhibition opens in the Digital Room, where visitors explore Van Gogh’s life through his letters, biographical panels and interactive displays. His development as an artist unfolds chronologically – from early sketches and struggles to the luminous works of his final period.

Installations include holographic sunflowers, interactive puzzles and digital coloring activities inspired by his paintings.

The journey continues with a virtual reality experience (VR) based on the artist’s final palette, lent to him by his friend Paul Gachet.

Developed for the Orsay Museum in Paris, this immersive VR is being shown in Türkiye for the first time.

Through the headset, golden fields glow and sunflowers rise high, giving the feeling of stepping directly into Van Gogh’s paintings. Accompanied by Franz Liszt’s piano transcriptions of Wagner operas – the artist’s favorite music – the experience becomes a symphony of color and sound.

The exhibition’s centerpiece, Van Gogh: An Immersive Journey, is a nearly 15-minute experience projected onto vast digital screens.

Viewers are taken through four chapters: the artist’s inner world, his pursuit of light in southern France, his stay at the Saint-Remy hospital – where he painted scenes from his window while undergoing psychiatric care – and a final segment where artificial intelligence analyzes over 2,000 of his works to generate new digital art in his style.

Another highlight is a touch-responsive installation in which iconic scenes such as The Starry Night and Wheatfield with Crows shift from calm to stormy as viewers interact with them, mirroring Van Gogh’s emotional states.

- A cultural shift

Van Gogh: Chasing the Light captures a broader cultural shift in Istanbul, where digital technology is redefining not just how art is displayed, but how it is felt and remembered.

The Digital Experience Center is at the forefront of this shift as Türkiye’s first full-scale facility of its kind. Situated along the historic Golden Horn, the center is quickly becoming a symbol of the city’s evolving identity, fusing tradition with technological innovation.

In March, the center hosted From Tradition to Future: Digital Reflections of Cultural Memory, a multi-room exhibition that reimagined traditional Turkish arts using AI, VR, AR and interactive projection.

Last year, the center also presented Beyond Time: Nikola Tesla, a nearly 10-minute virtual reality journey exploring Tesla’s life, inventions and inner world, starting on the stormy night of his birth.

At its heart, the Van Gogh exhibition underscores the artist’s belief that painting is not about copying reality but expressing feeling. Through layered sound, responsive surfaces and dynamic light projections, his emotions are rendered visible, tangible and interactive.

In 1882, Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels subtly.”

Today, this exhibition brings that vision to life in ways the artist himself could scarcely have imagined.