A time for brightness and festivity, the outdoor Winter Light exhibition – part of the Southbank Centre’s Winter Festival – returns after its successful debut year. The free open-air exhibition will illuminate the site’s iconic buildings and the Riverside Walk with dynamic and playful artworks during the darkest months of the year. 

Featuring a range of critically acclaimed international artists, the exhibition includes 10 artworks – some of which will be installed in multiple locations – that make ingenious use of light, colour and experimental film to touch on thought-provoking topics, from nature and technology to modern cities and spirituality. 

Participating artists in Winter Light are: David Batchelor, Oscar Fischinger, Zarah Hussain, Jacob Kvist, Teemu Määttänen, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, David Ogle, Lis Rhodes and Anne Roininen.

Multimedia artist Teemu Määttänen has remade the work Noste (2020), which loosely translates as ‘lift, upthrust and buoyancy’. Noste uses projection mapping to layer pulsing, gradienting colours onto minimalist columns. This deceptively simple combination of form and colour involves precise digital programming and technical accuracy. The work effectively brings a digital space into a physical space. Working with an impressive scale and architecture, Noste is a reality that appears to be an illusion. Noste was commissioned with the generous support of The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Anne Roininen’s light sculpture Car Show (2017 – 2021) is made from real cars. Cars have gone from symbols of luxury to objects which divide opinion and are now as linked to air pollution as they are to the freedom of the open road. Roininen’s work, which she calls ‘a graveyard for cars’, includes five cars that will be displayed throughout the site. By turning the cars into light sculptures, Roininen seems to be summoning mechanical ghosts. These cars appear abandoned, lost and from another age. The artwork is commissioned with the generous support of The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland.

Winter Light, Winter Festival, 4.11.2021-9.1.2022, Southbank Centre, London. More information about the exhibition can be found here. For more information about the Winter Festival, click here. 

Photograph: Teemu Määttänen, Noste. Photo credit Morley von Sternberg.