Leave yourself behind!

Throw open the dusty old closet, tumble into the rabbit hole, tear the fabric of the familiar. Imagine will push you right across the threshold through the power of immersive storytelling.

Every great Fantastic story starts at a threshold — the electrifying instant when reality slips away, replaced by something dazzling, strange, or spine-chilling. Think Alice plunging into Wonderland, Coraline stepping through the hidden door, or Neo unplugging from The Matrix. These Rites of Passage aren’t just plot twists; they’re emotional and transformative moments. In Immersive Media — Virtual, Augmented & Mixed Reality, and Performative acts— this journey becomes intensely visceral and personal.

Imagine Expanded 2025 invites you to experience these transformations for yourself in our theme programme Rites of Passage. Through our immersive exhibition and Expanded Cinema events, you’ll journey through new realms under the careful guidance of our hosts. Whether you’re strapping into a VR headset or losing yourself in ritualistic cinema, you’ll cross into experiences both otherworldly and deeply personal.

Step through the portal into our Immersive Exhibition at Hal West, crossing the border between the buzzing interior of De Hallen and a parallel reality. In collaboration with scenographer Jan Tomza-Osiecki, we’ve created an immersive wonderland at this new location — with three times the space we had before! Eight groundbreaking VR experiences will be waiting for you. Splash your emotions onto your virtual body in Soul Paint; venture on a Fantastic blind date in ROAMance; birth a sonic creature in Vacuum; spiral down a troubled mind in Korstmos; enter intimate chambers of desire in Dark Rooms; resurrect dried rivers with your voice in Rising River; and experience an Icelandic fairytale in Fallax. Each work is a gateway, each headset a looking glass, transforming De Hallen’s industrial surroundings into a labyrinth of thresholds where you’ll shed your everyday self like an old coat at the entrance. 

But that’s not all. The Rites of Passage programme also includes two unique Expanded Cinema events. Laugh through Polish horror classic She-Wolf / Wilczyca, reimagined with Dorota Masłowska’s wickedly sharp audio description. And decide on the fate of a woman in need in the multi-player interactive film The Run. 

As stated by composer, artist and philosopher Jaron Lanier — ‘journeys into virtual worlds offer new clarity when you return, making everyday reality startlingly vivid’. Like mythological guardians (Charon ferrying souls or Heimdall watching the rainbow bridge), our hosts will guide you from the familiar through thrilling uncertainty, returning you slightly-but-surely transformed – and perhaps a bit rumpled.

Expanded Cinema events 

• She-Wolf / Wilczyca (Marek Piestrak, 1982), with a new, original satirical audio description by contemporary Polish literary superstar Dorota Masłowska, aided by machine learning.  
• The Run (Paul Raschid, 2025), interactive choose-your-own-adventure branching-narrative film. 

Immersive Media experiences (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Mixed Reality and beyond) at the Imagine Expanded exhibition at Hal West

• Dark Rooms (Emmanuelle de Héricourt, Éliane Blaise, 2024)
• Fallax (Owen Hindley, 2025)
• Rising River (Lois He, 2024)
• Korstmos (Tibor de Jong, 2024) 
• ROAMance (Stanisław Liguziński, Ibrahim Quraishi, 2024) 
• Vacuum (Mads Damsbo, Laurits Flensted Jensen, Anne Sofie Steen Sverdrup, 2025)
• Soul Paint (Sarah Ticho, Niki Smit, 2024)