Tartu Light Festival Presents More Than 30 Works

A light festival called TAVA is taking place in Tartu, Estonia, aiming to change the urban space and introduce visitors to light installations. This time, more than 30 works are set up in the University of Tartu Botanical Garden. The light route is open to visitors until 24 October.

Antimatter as the theme

The festival's main theme is antimatter. Through it, the organisers invite people to think about how we distribute attention: whatever the light is aimed at becomes more noticeable, while whatever stays in the dark recedes into the background.

Elo Liiv, curator of Tava26, told the Estonian public broadcaster's news programme "Aktuaalne kaamera" that antimatter cannot be directly observed or experienced in physics. In her view, art and culture are, in a certain sense, antimatter that creates light when combined with matter.

Participants and works

More than 30 artists and over 40 students from art schools take part. Pupils of a children's art school are also showing work.

Rasmus Puksmann, a student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, experiments with light and darkness, exploring how light, space and time affect perception. From the outside, his piece looks like a new, entirely artificial space in the forest, but once inside, perception and the sense of time change.

Works by foreign artists are also on display. An installation by Belgian digital artist Michaël Verlinden uses motion-recognition technology to turn a person's movements into shapes and landscapes. The artist stresses the importance of an interactive link between people and the screen.

Light pollution

The festival also continues to address light pollution in cities. According to Liiv, 50 bus stops in the city carry an information campaign on the issue. The stops are decorated in red and list six steps anyone can take so that stars can once again be seen in Tartu.

In addition to the light route in the botanical garden, the TAVA festival presents four more exhibitions in Tartu.