When Your Number’s Up
Rel Pham
Presented by Arts House
Thursday 12 February – Friday 6 March 2026
Open Mon – Fri, 10am – 4pm
Tickets
Free — no bookings required
Duration
Exhibition open daily (approx. 30 minutes viewing time)
Warnings
Suitable for ages 12+
Themes of technology, superstition, and fate.
Contains flashing imagery and bright colour sequences.
Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne
Wheelchair Accessible
Quiet Space Available
Assistance Animal
Visual Rating 75%
Open Captioning
Audio descriptionA video installation of a shifting dreamscape where fragments of prophecy float through the air.
When Your Number’s Up probes humanity’s obsession with prediction — from fortune tellers and omens to data analytics and AI — revealing how both mysticism and technology promise certainty in an uncertain world. As cryptic hexagrams and whispered readings unfold, the installation asks: when we seek answers from algorithms or the divine, are we chasing truth, or simply reassurance that the story ends in our favour?
Audiences are invited to step behind the surface viewing, taste fragments of the creative process, and see how experimentation becomes the finished artwork.
About the artist
Rel Pham is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist, designer, animator and illustrator known for his vibrant palette and surrealist approach. Drawing from ancient fables and rituals, he explores the interconnected nature of physical and digital realities through screen-based video, animation and installation. Pham’s practice reimagines traditional scenes of Cao Dai temples and Western classical iconography in luminous neon and LED light. His hybrid worlds collapse time and space, exposing the invisible code behind our daily lives and transforming data’s ghostly logic into stories of human connection.
Artist statement
In When Your Number’s Up , I’ve created a digital temple of uncertainty, a space where prediction becomes performance. Horses, numbers, symbols: they gallop and flicker like data packets or spirits, both wild and contained. The work is about our desire to believe, whether in divination or machine learning, and how those beliefs can both comfort and trap us.
Artistic credits
Details
Presented by Arts House
Thursday 12 February – Friday 6 March 2026
Open Mon – Fri, 10am – 4pm
Tickets
Free — no bookings required
Duration
Exhibition open daily (approx. 30 minutes viewing time)
Warnings
Suitable for ages 12+
Themes of technology, superstition, and fate.
Contains flashing imagery and bright colour sequences.
Arts House
North Melbourne Town Hall
521 Queensberry St,
North Melbourne
Wheelchair Accessible Quiet Space Available Assistance Animal Visual Rating 75% Open Captioning Audio descriptionSupported by –
Commissioned by Arts House. Supported by the City of Melbourne through Creative Spaces.
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist
Image description: Glowing I Ching hexagram that is semi-transparent with green Chinese characters on a black background, rising like a neon monolith made of shifting, pixelated blocks.
