Excitement is building for the opening of The Light in Durham on Saturday 22 August, the first venue in County Durham of its scale and remit dedicated to delivering contemporary art of national and international significance. Formerly the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) Museum and Art Gallery, the opening follows a significant investment by the venue’s owner, Durham County Council, and transformation by award-winning architects NORR.
Bringing together contemporary art and creativity with local history, scientific discovery and technological innovation, The Light will explore the most important ideas of our time through an ambitious programme of exhibitions, events, immersive experiences and new commissions. The venue’s links to military history will be retained through a dedicated DLI Gallery telling the story of the historic regiment through objects, documents and film footage from the DLI Collection. Going beyond military history, the DLI exhibition features images, sound, hands-on interactive displays and rich sensory experiences which tell a deeply human story of identity, belonging and community.
Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light
22 August 2026 – 17 January 2027
Installation of Our Spectral Vision (2016) by Liz West at The Light, 2026 Commissioned by the Natural History Museum, London, UK for the exhibition Colour and Vision: Through the eyes of nature. Photo: courtesy of The Light
The Light will open on 22 August with Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light, a pivotal exhibition exploring artists using light in extraordinary and experimental ways.
The museum takes Joseph Swan (1828 – 1914) as a starting point – a British physicist, chemist and inventor of the light bulb, who was born in Sunderland within the historic county of Durham. His spirit of innovation continues in the region today with world class research into space, optics and communication at Durham University and in the emerging Durham Innovation District of which The Light will play a key role as a meeting place and creative hub.
Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light explores the connection between innovation and science, art and creativity through the medium of light. The exhibition includes new commissions and works by renowned artists including Olafur Eliasson, Tracey Emin, David Shrigley, Steve McQueen, Cerith Wyn Evans, Liz West and Chila Burman and is organised around five core themes. The show examines how artists have employed light as a material in their work from the 1960s to the present day, using newly developed technologies from fluorescent tubes and neons, to LEDs and digital media. This familiar medium will be explored in different and complex ways, from single artworks to immersive installations, throughout the building.
Tracey Emin It’s a crime to live with the person you don’t love 2021 Image: ©Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS, 2026. Photo ©White Cube (Theo Christelis)
Artworks Using Light Sources
Swan’s Practical Electrical Incandescent Lamp (1878-79) is the starting point for the exhibition with his historic and groundbreaking lightbulb as the primary inspiration. As visitors enter the exhibition, they’ll be greeted by Ceal Floyer’s work Light Switch which is a slide projection of a switch and invites us to think about the real and the imagined as well as the blurred boundary between function and illusion. Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight is a poetic work by Scottish artist Katie Paterson which connects the power of nature and the vastness of space and geological time to a human experience of the everyday.
Palm Sign by artist Yto Barrada is part of a larger body of her work, using the motif of the non-native palm tree as a comment on the rapid modernisation of Morocco. Her work centres on the tensions around borderlands, immigration, tourism and resistance strategies. Meanwhile, Liz West‘s Our Spectral Vision uses LED-lit dichroic glass prisms to fill the space in saturated colour, creating an immersive environment that explores how we perceive and experience light.
Yto Barrada Palm Sign 2010 Image: courtesy of Yto Barrada, Pace Gallery, and Sfeir-Semler Gallery
Perception
This theme is embodied in Dan Flavin’s Untitled (to Don Judd, colourist) 1-5. The artist is renowned for his groundbreaking use of mass-produced, commercially available fluorescent lights from hardware stores. He is considered one of the first artists to embrace the medium of light. James Clar’s The Box by the Window plays with our perception of reality, time and space whilst Iván Navarro’s Manhole creates the optical illusion of three-dimensional space and depth. This captivating work made from lights and mirrors appears infinite.
James Clar The Box by the Window 2022 Image: © James Clar Studio
Text
Neon is utilised in extraordinary ways as seen in seminal artworks including Tracey Emin’s It’s a crime to live with the person you don’t love and Glenn Ligon’s black neon Warm Broad Glow. Steve McQueen’s neon Remember Me 2016 adds a poignant reference to the Durham Light Infantry collection also on display in The Light. This work is one of a number of handwritten versions of the words ‘remember me’ which the artist and filmmaker asked his friends to write. Each one an anonymous voice, the work explores mortality, loss and memory.
Drawing on Light
Light is used as a three-dimensional drawing tool by Cerith Wyn Evans in his Neon Forms (After Noh II) which captures performers’ movements from traditional Japanese Noh theatre; and in Chila Burman’s suspended Hanging Monkey, a multi-coloured primate in three dimensions, expanding her neon practice into sculpture. Burman’s bold two-dimensional neons were displayed in Durham’s Marketplace at Lumiere festival in 2023.
Science and Technology
Science and nature is explored by Olafur Eliasson’s large-scale sensory work Stardust particle named after a microscopic remnant of an exploded star and Tatsuo Miyajima’s Floating Time V2-C–12 which uses the now retro typeface of LED numbers. This mesmerising work features a continuous constellation of randomly generated numbers projected onto a small white table.
David Shrigley’s playful work Light Switch concludes the exhibition and makes a direct reference to Ceal Floyer’s Light Switch (at the start of the exhibition) both in subject matter and display mechanism.
New Commissions
Visitors will be welcomed into the gallery by a playful, interactive site-specific new commission by Tine Bech and a new work by Katrin Hanusch which will respond to the architecture of the gallery using broken laptop screens, relics of our digital age. Newcastle-based designer Erin McDougle’s work Two for Joy is based on the old children’s nursery rhyme, traditionally spoken when spotting a magpie: One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told. Magpies are considered a bird of ill omen in some cultures and in Britain, as far back as the 16th century. At The Light McDougle has positioned a pair of birds in the café for visitors to try and spot. In the double height atrium space, Maarten Baas’ Real Time, Sweepers’ Clock accurately visualises the onward progress of time in a 12 hour performance of men sweeping rubbish.
Visitors will experience different sensory encounters throughout the exhibition, demonstrating how the simple light bulb can produce a myriad of possibilities.
NORR’s careful remodelling and extension of the original building has breathed new life into the site which represents a major transformation of the area. The new exhibition galleries at The Light are positioned on the top floor of the building and have been designed to host world-class national and touring exhibitions.
The name of the Durham County Council-run venue is inspired by the building’s history, as well as its future use. The new name reflects County Durham’s many associations with light – from the creation of Bede’s lunar calendar 1,300 years ago to Durham University’s involvement in the NASA James Webb Space Telescope.
Situated at the heart of Aykley Heads, and a short walk from Durham railway station, The Light will be an anchor institution of Durham’s Innovation District, which took a major step forward last November when Durham County Council signed a Collaboration Agreement with Muse and Durham University to accelerate its development as a hub for investment and innovation.
The Light, will be a sister venue to The Story, which provides the permanent home to the DLI Collection. The two venues will work together, along with other attractions across the county, to support a local, regional and national visitor offer that celebrates Durham’s heritage and ambition.