Illuminate Adelaide is back for its third year (its second full, uninterrupted program after 2021 launched amid wild weather and a snap seven-day lockdown) with an expanded program of free and ticketed events combining art, music and technology.
The mid-winter festival will light up CBD streets, laneways and buildings from June 28 to July 30 with large-scale, immersive and interactive public installations, vivid light projections, lasers, live music, inflatable sculptures and more.
Montreal-based multimedia studio Moment Factory is back with two new experiences – Resonate in the Adelaide Botanic Garden and Mirror Mirror in Victoria Square/Tarntanyangga. The first, a follow-up to the group’s sell-out show Light Cycles, which lit up the Botanic Garden in 2021 and 2022, features six newly created installations along a 1.7-kilometre night-time trail. The latter is a choose-your-own adventure featuring a series of vivid interactive installations that alter with each interaction, so every visitor has a different experience.
Architects of Air is back too – with the latest installation from its “luminarium” series of experiential inflatable labyrinths – as is the free city-wide festival centrepiece City Lights, which returns with 40 new installations, projections and large-scale activations. Among them is a towering, sculptural floral field that awakens at night to put on the ultimate fireworks display; a “super-sized musical jungle” of light, colour, and sound; and an east end-wide series of portraits by chef and artist Poh Ling Yeow, based on her signature series, The Girl.
There’ll also be a work – Into the Light – projected onto Government House highlighting some of South Australia’s most innovative women, while New Light returns for a third year to King William Road with moving image works from three rising First Nations creatives.
This year’s music program includes experimental-classical visual concert series Klassik Underground, experimental electronic music event Unsound Adelaide (featuring international artists Space Afrika, Sofie Birch, Antonina Nowacka, Bbymutha, and more) and a performance by Yothu Yindi – in a special Naidoc Week celebration, to celebrate the band’s 30th anniversary – plus shows by Brooklyn-based electronic artist Oneohtrix Point Never, English producer Tourist, and rapper-drummer Dobby.
Other events include an experimental exhibition of projection art by six South Australian multidisciplinary artists at The Mill; a mesmerising study of light and darkness, shape and movement, perception and reality by Restless Dance Theatre; and the return of Light Creatures, a suite of inflatable animals, lanterns and illuminations at the Adelaide Zoo.
The festival’s food hub Base Camp will also return – this time in a new location in Rundle Park/Kadlitpina – with firepits and pop-up eateries and bars to keep you warm and fuelled between events.
“We are once again transforming winter nights and after the overwhelming response to our 2022 program, we are delighted to announce an expanded, curated program of experiences, installations, and performances showcasing the very best examples of the convergence of art and technology our city and the world has to offer,” co-founders and creative directors Lee Cumberlidge and Rachael Azzopardi said in a press release.
The festival will run from Wednesday 28 June to Sunday 30 July. Head here for more information.
