Taking place from 1 – 31 July, Illuminate Adelaide will see the city come alive with lights, live music, visual art, discussion, installation and much more for its second ever event.
A celebration of innovation, music, art, light and technology, Adelaide’s winter music and arts festival, Illuminate Adelaide, has announced its return in 2022, lifting the lid on its impressive new lineup.
Following last year’s wildly successful inaugural edition, the second iteration of Illuminate Adelaide will now take place over the entire month of July, transforming laneways, venues and spaces across the city with a program of free and ticketed discussions, installations, dance, live music, immersive experiences and much more.
The key takeaways
- Illuminate Adelaide is happening from 1 – 31 Jul
- The music and arts programs have been revealed
- The festival will take over various spaces across the city
Keep up with the latest music news, festivals, interviews and reviews here.
Promising to entice locals, interstate and international visitors to the city as it brings the streets of Adelaide to a bright and intriguing light this winter, the festival is already looking the goods with its 2022 program, featuring Istanbul-based visionaries Ouchhh Studio’s major exhibition Wisdom of AI Light – an AI-driven multisensory experience that’s putting the art in artificial intelligence; Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s ground-breaking band Gorillaz; the return of celebrated Montreal studio Moment Factory’s Light Cycles at the Botanic Gardens; the free city-wide centrepiece City Lights bringing over 40 large-scale installations, projections and immersive works to the city; plus a wider music program that is a glorious journey through music in all its forms and variations.
Curated by co-founders and creative directors Rachael Azzopardi and Lee Cumberlidge, the festival, will see local, national and international creatives and technologists alike come together for a vibrant winter festival, with last year’s edition attracting over 500,000 attendances and bringing more than $40 million to the South Australian economy – despite wild weather and a COVID lockdown impacting the inaugural year.
“After an overwhelming response to our inaugural program in 2021 we are delighted to announce for 2022 an expanded program of experiences, installations, and performances showcasing the very best examples of the convergence of art and technology our city and the world has to offer right now,” the founders say.
“We are looking forward to welcoming hundreds of thousands of South Australians and visitors to our state into our city to participate in a massive program of free and ticketed events across the month of July.”
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Further highlights of the 2022 event will be the return of Light Creatures which will take audiences behind the gates of Adelaide Zoo after dark; the Australian premiere of Joanna Dudley’s operatic video installation We Will Slam You With Our Wings which steals from some of history’s most notoriously sexist speeches and recasts them into a feminist war cry echoing through the ages; Futures, a 50-metre walkway of light, sound and mirrors by Lucid Creates; and the Squidsoup collective’s Submergence, comprising thousands of suspended lights visitors can wander among. Spanish 3D-projection artist Filip Roca will also follow up his 2021 festival hit by lighting up Adelaide Festival Centre’s exterior; and a CBD’s permanent nine-storey screen with The Rundle Lantern.
Ouchhh Studio is Illuminate Adelaide’s 2022 Luminary Artist In Residence, and in addition to the aforementioned Wisdom of AI Light, the Studio will also present Ocean Data at Light Adelaide as part of the City Lights program, and Ouchhh Studio directors Ferdi Alici and Eylul Alici can be heard in conversation at an artist keynote address.
On the music front, alongside the world’s greatest virtual band Gorillaz who will be performing their first Aussie shows in over a decade, the festival will shine with the genre-defying music and visual series KLASSIK underground where globetrotting Australian violist Tahlia Petrosian will direct the collaboration between a star-studded ensemble of musicians and Australia’s foremost visual artists across three nights including CAPITAL WASTE (Liam Somerville), Robin Fox and Margie Medlin.
The Illuminate Adelaide 2022 music program will also feature Unsound Adelaide – the international celebration of cutting edge experimental and electronic music – returning to its spiritual home in the southern hemisphere. From its ground-breaking flagship festival in Krakow, Poland to 30 locations around the globe, Unsound has become a magnet for some of the most exciting, innovative and arresting sounds heard anywhere in the world, and its program for Illuminate Adelaide will take over the Dom Polski Centre on 22 and 23 July with heavy hitter Stephen O’Malley of Sunn O))) collaborating with experimental musician Kali Malone, frequent collaborators and mind-bending performers Sinjin Hawke (USA) & Zora Jones (Austria), 700 Bliss (USA) the take-no-prisoners duo of DJ Haram and Moor Mother and Australian cult favourites HTRK, as well as the late-night Unsound Club at The Lab, with Air Max ’97 and Corin and more.
There will also be a unique collaboration between Chinese-Australian avant-garde composer Mindy Meng Wang and Melbourne based Tim Shiel at Nexus Arts, and a distinctive lineup across four weekends at The Lab at Light where light and sound will converge to present some of the most cutting-edge new music locally and from around the globe.
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Shining a light on South Australia and its regions for the month of July, Illuminate Adelaide welcomes people from all walks of life to experience this shimmering program of free and ticketed events by local, national and international artists and companies.
Illuminate Adelaide is happening from July 1 – July 31 2022. Head to the festival website for the full program.
