The brainchild of LEGO® Masters winners Jackson Harvey and Alex Towler, RELICS: A New World Rises opens to the public on Saturday 4 March and runs until Sunday 23 July 2023.

Set in the year 2530, long after the world has been abandoned by humans, the exhibition takes visitors to a world where LEGO® minifigures have risen from the debris to build intricate civilisations in discarded and forgotten objects once inhabited or used by humans, reminding us of the impact that we have had on our environment.

Among the ‘relics’ are a marauding band of inventors who have reverse-engineered a grandfather clock to build a time machine, a cryonics facility nestled inside a vintage refrigerator to keep minifigures in a frosty state safe from the effects of climate change, and a retro arcade with airlocks and elevators that connect a series of gaming machines to form a futuristic spaceport.

South Australian Museum Acting Director Justine van Mourik is expecting RELICS to be a big hit with visitors.

“We have never staged an exhibition quite like this,” she said. “No matter your age, there’s something for everyone to marvel at in these clever worlds.

“Kids will love the number of minifigures and all the little hidden LEGO® details in each of the relics, while the young at heart and anyone who’s ever owned a LEGO® set or a LEGO® minifig will appreciate the creativity, engineering and masterful design used to turn everyday items into one-of-a-kind artistic creations of curious worlds with strange stories to tell.

“We are incredibly excited to be welcoming another world premiere exhibition to the South Australian Museum, with RELICS arriving soon after the highly successful run of Six Extinctions.”

Co-creator Jackson Harvey said the RELICS exhibition was two years in the making and born out of a desire to create something that pushed the bounds of their imagination using their love of LEGO® and storytelling abilities.

“The minifigures are the plastic puppets of our stories, and we’ve had so much fun constructing hundreds of narratives with them,” he said. “We hope people can find these stories and create some of their own.”

Co-creator Alex Towler described the relics, built over many months with his high school best friend, as “really weird and kind of wonderful”.

“This is a completely new creative endeavour for us, and we have been able to really give it everything we’ve got to realise its full potential,” he said.

“We have basically just been hanging out and building LEGO® together which is half the fun.

“Kids are going to love the relics, but we’ve also created them with adults in mind, with the objects full of nostalgia and the stories we’re telling packed with references only adults will understand.”

RELICS: A New World Rises opens on Saturday 4 March and runs until Sunday 23 July 2023.

Tickets start from $12 and are available to purchase here: https://events.humanitix.com/lego-relics

LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorise, or endorse this exhibition.