SITE
City Gallery
Sauerfelder Str. 14 — 20, 58511 Lüdenscheid
DATES
20 — 29 MAR 2025
7:00 PM — 11:00 PM
City Gallery
Exhibition
27. MAR 2025
7:00 PM — 8:00 PM
VHS
Lecture
PROTEST AT NIGHT: LIGHT FOR FREEDOM
Documentations of art actions — curated by Thomas Schielke.
The exhibition “Protests at Night: Light for Freedom” by Thomas Schielke can be seen at the Städtische Galerie. He has selected documentations of art actions that use light as a socio-political signal. The video exhibition explores the transformative power of social energy. Artists and activists around the world have already used light as a medium to draw attention to social grievances and injustice in public spaces.
CONTEXT
The increasing urgency of social and political problems around the world has prompted artists and activists in many countries to consider how they can make their intervention strategies more effective. The use and adaptation of new technologies plays an important role in this. In this context, light and its multiple applications have particularly attracted the attention of artists, intellectuals, protesters, activists and other politically engaged citizens. They are aware of the power of striking still and moving images to make people watch, listen and read, and want to use the diverse technical possibilities of lighting technology to attract wider media attention, whether through traditional press and television channels or social media communication. In recent years, an astonishing variety of new ways of using light to generate attention and convey messages have emerged. For the artist, curator and new media theorist Peter Weibel, the combination of art and activism is an increasingly relevant global phenomenon, as he states: “Artivism [..] is perhaps the first new art form of the twenty-first century”.
Thomas Schielke has been following this particular development of art, activism and light intensively for several years. For the LightRoutes, he has compiled a series of socio-critical actions as videos on the theme of “Protests at night: light for freedom”. This makes the LightRoutes the first international light festival to exhibit projects on activism and light. Using light as a medium for protests reflects the courage of artists and activists to boldly and non-violently name injustice and draw attention to it. Their attitude is not characterized by resignation, but by creative hope. On the one hand, the interventions appear gentle, as no traces remain in the environment after the lights have been switched off; on the other hand, they express a radical attitude, as they do not address political problems superficially, but analyze them thoroughly and position themselves in the public space.
The video collection includes internationally renowned artists as well as younger collectives, such as Krzysztof Wodiczko as a pioneer of political light projection, the Mexican-Canadian multimedia artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, the French street artist and photographer JR in collaboration with Darren Aronofsky, the Spanish umbrella organization No Somos Delito, a coalition of numerous civil rights associations, the New York collective “The Illuminator”, the British political campaign group Led by Donkeys and the Center for Political Beauty.
