| Exhibition Duration | From 21 March to 21 April |
|---|---|
| Location | Spier Wine Farm in Stellenbosch |
| Exhibition Theme | Site-specific installations that activate the landscape |
Table of Contents
A Celebration of Nocturnal Adventure
From 21 March to 21 April, the Spier Light Art exhibition unfolds on Spier Wine Farm in Stellenbosch, transforming the farm into an immersive space of nocturnal adventure. With numerous site-specific installations activating the landscape, visitors are free to wander, discover and immerse themselves in the play of light and the stories that each artwork tells – an embodied reminder of art’s transformative power to illuminate even the darkest corners of our world and minds.
Dedicated to Growing Light Art in Africa
One of the only dedicated contemporary light art exhibitions in Africa, Spier Light Art is dedicated to growing the light art genre in the Global South. While focused on curated, site-specific light art interventions by emerging and established South African artists, the festival ignites fresh sparks and interchange with visiting artists and audiences from the continent and the world at large through a structured residency programme designed to respond to local context.
Artist Lineup
This year, the exhibition hosts Swiss artists Sophie Guyot and Florian Bach. Having participated in past iterations of Spier Light Art, Guyot returns to run a three-day workshop with the Spier agricultural team, designed around the farm workers’ lived experiences and collaboratively producing a text-based light work that poses questions about the future of agriculture. Bach’s installation uses floodlights, typically used to control or limit access to designated spaces, and questions light’s role in border surveillance and social control.
Interactive and Innovative Installations
Since its inception in 2018, the exhibition has reached more than 12 000 people over the course of its annual month-long run, providing free public access to a wildly diverse array of contemporary sculptural installations that use light, sound and video to entrance and provoke. Maximal experimentation, interactivity and innovation are encouraged. The 16 selected light installations for 2025 have been conceptualised and built by artists and designers (professionals, students, institutions and collectives) who responded to an open call.
Themes and Storytelling
While the featured artworks tend to have an ethereal, ephemeral or enchanting quality, innate to the phenomenon of light itself, they also communicate ideas and feelings related to technology, resilience and life in South Africa with all its complexity and challenging narratives, as well as to the history and lived realities of a working wine farm. This year’s installations delve into light as a mode of surveillance and control and as a source of personal protection and safety.
- ‘This year, Spier Light Art reflects on three broad themes,’ say curators Vaughn Sadie and Jay Pather.
- The first is the farm as a site of colonial memory and shifting relationships to the land through the lens of historical and contemporary labour, farming and environmental practices.
- The second concerns light as infrastructure in the built environment, with works that reflect on access, surveillance and safety.
- The third arises out of works that evoke joy through humour or materiality while still dealing with our contemporary condition.
‘The way you navigate the meanings of the artworks installed on the farm is very organic and very much up to you,’ says Pather. ‘There’s no hierarchy,’ he adds. ‘It’s not like going into a white cube gallery, where there’s a clear and strong central narrative. The way you choose to move through the space – whether you choose to linger on one side of the lake or to cross the bridge – builds up its own narrative journey. You might encounter something that is deeply personal, or something that triggers the political in you, or something that looks up beyond our known world into the cosmos. The layering of conceptual clusters is what makes it fun to navigate.’
Light is a phenomenon that we sometimes take for granted. It is one of the key essentials for life on Earth – from plants to humans – to thrive and survive. Like most living things, humans are bioluminescent: we glow. We don’t have the visual capability to see ourselves emitting light, but we can connect with these mysterious wavelengths in ways that bring to light unexplored aspects of ourselves.
Now in its seventh year, Spier Light Art is Africa’s leading contemporary light art exhibition. A vital platform for emerging and established artists and collectives to showcase large-scale light installations, Spier Light Art is dedicated to pushing light art to its limits on the African continent.