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Your Face Here, one of the most popular free exhibitions developed at the Otago Museum, is continuing to find new audiences and will be presented at Palmerston North next month.
The interactive exhibition presents "the story of faces" from several perspectives, such as culture, nature and science. And it was seen by more than 140,000 visitors when it ran at the Otago Museum from December 18, 2010 until July 3 last year.
Key interactive elements from the show were also later re-used successfully as "Your Face Here: the Science Edition", which was exhibited at the museum's Discovery World science centre from December 21 last year until it ended last month.
The show is scheduled to run at Te Manawa, the Palmerston North museum, art gallery and science centre, between May 26 and August 19.
In exchange, the Palmerston North museum will provide its own Magic Mirror exhibition, which is expected to open at the Otago Museum in late September.
Otago Museum chief executive Shimrath Paul said such exhibition exchanges were "a cost-effective way to bring in touring exhibitions for our community" and also enabled Otago Museum initiatives to reach "wider audiences".
The Your Face Here show enabled visitors to take digital photographs of themselves and to project how their faces were likely to change over time as a result of heavy smoking, excessive sun exposure or excessive weight gain.
Participants could also email the resulting images to themselves for their own later use.
Otago Museum experience and development director Clare Wilson said this was the first exchange exhibition the museum had undertaken in the past five years.
The Otago show had clearly been "a very high-quality project" and the exchange arrangements were "very positive" for both participating institutions and their visitors.
Part of the show's appeal was that instead of people going to a museum to see other things, the visitors were actually being encouraged to learn more about themselves, she said.
"This exhibition puts you right in the picture. There's something enormously attractive about that," she said.