The second Copenhagen Light Festival

Winter is the time for celebrating light, because we all have an innate need for light, especially at the time of year when sunshine is in short supply. One of these events, held throughout the month of February, is the second Copenhagen Light Festival.
Like any self-respecting light festival, the Copenhagen initiative includes a vast range of installations specifically designed to make walking around the city a multisensorial experience; a number of light installations are associated with sounds.
Here, we present a number of the installations proposed this year which, even if seen only in photographs, reveal the ferment of creativity connected with light.
Corona - Black Hole Sun is a work created by design studio Kollision in partnership with LiteNordic Spaces and Martin Professional specifically for the Copenhagen waterfront. The old brick façades of the Nordatlantens Brygge add to the fascination to the installation, which is composed of an easily identifiable circle, with a programmable light shining on the façade to create the illusion of a solar eclipse. The installation is intended to reclaim the name Corona and anchor it to the optimism represented by the sun; the artists’ idea is that a solar eclipse, like the pandemic to which the name alludes, causes us to fear that our entire basis of existence has been put out of play for a short while, but it also heralds the return of light. And so its shining is a message of hope.
Bubbleds by RandomG is inspired by Copenaghen’s canals, underlining their beauty and lighting up the waterfront in the port of Havnegade with 20 circles of coloured LED light: their reflections in the water and their position create the sensation of bubbles dancing on the sea.  
Electric sun by Chilean artist Paula Castillo, located in Zieglers Gaard, is a poetic representation of the path of the sunlight framed in architectural spaces, though in this case it is exhibited outdoors. In short, an immersive sequence of changing lights and colours projected from the façade of a building replicates the organic quality of natural light, inviting passers-by to slow down and let themselves be absorbed in a surreal, magical scene combining light, colour and time.
Wauww stands for What an unusually wonderful wave, and is an installation by lighting designer and artist Mads Vegas consisting of 250 luminous elements playfully blending into Kalvebod Bølge’s bridge. Mariliis Kundla and Sofia Ivarsson created REFLEX, a kinetic artwork highlighting the scale of architectural space, consisting of two diamonds containing a total of 624 highly reflective prismatic medallions that look like a school of fish. They produce subtle light effects appearing and disappearing on the waterfront of Gammel Strand, reflecting the elements in their surroundings like the day-to-day rhythm of the wind, daylight and the cityscape.
To find out about the location of these and other light installations and read or listen to information about the installations and the artists who created them, download the Copenhagen Light Festival - Within10Minutes app, a true guide to exploration of the “artfully” illuminated city.

Christiane Bürklein

Copenhagen Light Festival
February 5 through 27, 2021
Copenhagen, Denmark
More information: https://copenhagenlightfestival.org/
Photos: Christoffer Askman, KongshaugTV, CLF