Southbank Centre, Winter Lights

This winter season, London's Southbank Centre glows with light, as it hosts a free open-air exhibition of artworks, all of which feature light and colour, some also using animation, under the collective title Winter Lights.

There will be 17 artworks in total, with new ones being added across the Southbank buildings and facades and along the riverside until the New Year.

A range of international artists worked to celebrate how the medium of light can transform our physical spaces. Their artworks also explore ideas about nature, politics and society, gender, aesthetics and the act of looking.

Among the artists featured is David Batchelor, whose work 60 Minute Spectrum (pictured top) returns to the Hayward Gallery's pyramid rooflights and the Queen Elizabeth Hall facade with colour that subtly changes as it moves through the entire visual spectrum.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's To The Moon is an animated video that uses the idea of a lunar voyage to explore cosmology, mythology, history and science.

PP Sunstrum, To The Moon still from animation
To The Moon is projected onto the Royal Festival Hall, along with Emma Talbot’s animation Birds, Freedom, which presents a female figure navigating a landscape made up of abstract patterns and colours, and Kota Ezawa’s supercalifragilistic, an animated video that provides a light-hearted take on the flying abilities of a well-known fictional character.

The Southbank buildings are not the only ones to benefit from these stunning light displays: the plane trees on the Riverside Walk by the river Thames will be illuminated with glowing neon flex, creating a multicoloured canopy over the heads of pedestrians. This work bears the signature of David Ogle, an artist who treats light as a sculptural material.

These are just some examples to illustrate the scale and variety of the Southbank Centre's Winter Lights exhibition. It'll surely provide a way to dispel the stresses of lockdown and bring a Christmassy feeling to a city battered by the current Covid pandemic.