STATEMENT BY CURATOR NIKA PERNE

Edition 2026

Natural and artificial light have long inspired artists and humanity alike. In recent decades, light has become a significant creative medium, transforming public spaces into immersive canvases, where architecture, innovation, landscape, and community converge.

The second edition of the RE.LIGHT International Light Art Festival initiates a renewed dialogue with Regensburg, the UNESCO World Heritage city, utilizing the urban landscape as a canvas for site-specific interventions and a platform for exhibiting works by regional, national, and international artists. Regensburg is a city with a rich history and a forward-looking spirit. We invite the visitors to rediscover its heritage, experience its contemporary character, and engage with its vision for the future at each festival visit.

We are pleased to introduce several new venues at this year’s festival, including Velodrom, a legendary cycling hall turned into a theatre venue, the historic Obermünsterviertel, which is currently being transformed into a green city oasis, and the recently restored Hospital Church of St. Katharina at Stadtamhof.

As in its inaugural edition, the second edition of the festival aims to present artists from various backgrounds, working with the medium of light, who were chosen for their artistic quality, their ability to engage in a dialogue with their chosen locations, as well as their positioning in the overall conceptual framework of the festival. The second edition of the RE.LIGHT International Light Art Festival aims to encourage reflection on shared values, rethink the use of light as an artistic medium, reconsider historical concepts and the contemporary world, reshape our perception of familiar places, and foster reconnection with our surroundings, ourselves, and others – to encourage a collective experience.

Selected works showcase diverse uses of the medium and invite us to experience immersive environments that are both inspiring and challenging. They convey messages about the challenges of today’s world – such as social visibility, gender, and the controlled modern environments, inhibit and rewrite the venues in which they are presented, highlight the city’s layered history, and encourage us to reconnect with natural habitats and fluidity often lost in a fast-paced urban setting. These works give us a glimpse into another creative universe of invited artists, on whom we rely to immerse us in their worlds of wonder – allowing us to pause, experience, and reflect.

 

Nika Perne, Artistic Director