The must-see installations and projections at this year’s Vivid Light festival

It’s a week out from the 15th edition of the Vivid Light festival and Sydney is looking like a bare Christmas tree before it is dressed with baubles – but that process is well under way.

Along the harbour foreshore, and in the open spaces around it, eight kilometres of fibre-optic cable have been laid to bring to life 44 light installations and projections around the theme of “dream” for the 23-night festival, kicking off on May 23.

ONGA creative director Dutchanee Ongarjsiri inside Lumina Dream.Credit: Steven Siewert

The 2025 program has increased the number of standalone projections and installations by almost 50 per cent, compared with 2024. This year, the entire Vivid Light Walk from Central Station to Circular Quay is free.

“What visitors see is artistic brilliance but behind the scenes is a remarkable feat of logistics and teamwork,” says Gill Minervini, in her final year as Vivid festival director.

“We’re talking 12 kilometres of temporary fencing, nearly 9000 square metres of event flooring and eight kilometres of fibre-optic cable bringing the installations and projections to life.

“Our team co-ordinates 72 different event management plans, 280 traffic plans and deploys approximately 3500 operational staff and volunteers across all agencies and suppliers.

“It truly takes a village to create and execute Australia’s biggest event and as soon as the festival ends we essentially begin planning for the following year.”

The Bangkok-based ONGA group is behind Lumina Dream, six teardrop-shaped steel structures at Barangaroo that were still being installed on a wet Friday. Three stand six metres tall, another three are four metres, all covered by a special blue dichroic film.

Prefabricated in Thailand before being shipped to Sydney, they are to be installed with sensors that can measure wind direction and speed, temperature and humidity.

These make the teardrops not only visually stunning, says ONGA’s creative director Dutchanee Ongarjsiri, but also a functioning weather station.

Visitors can scan a QR code or website to access the relayed data for up-to-date weather information.

“We think raindrops are the perfect symbol for connecting dreams with real-world change,” she says. “Within each raindrop there’s an entire world reflected in a distorted and transformed way – it’s similar to how dreams present reality from new and challenging perspectives.”

It’s the third Vivid outing for ONGA, which in 2017 built giant LED-lit sunflowers by the harbour, their heads bowed in imitation of the natural process of heliotropism, the process whereby plants track the passing of the sun.

In 2023, the team created Spirograph, a fountain where light, not water, flows, tripped by energy from wind that transforms its speed and colour.

The firm is also responsible for Symphony of Light, a gigantic slinky at Darling Harbour that captures the joy and spontaneity of childhood in its blue and green neon spirals.

Other highlights of this year’s winter festival include:

SomniUs

Located on the Barangaroo headland, this fluid and interactive installation responds to movement. Look up and you will see thousands of rods suspended above, rippling with waves of light and sound synchronised to the movements of those wandering below.

King Dingo

Projected on the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, King Dingo is a multimedia video work in which audiences are led through Australia’s colonial history through the eyes of the dingo, a First Nations everyman. It’s created by Archibald Prize winner Vincent Namatjira, whose latest self-portrait, also named for his totem, was a finalist in this year’s portrait prize.

Vincent Namatjira’s King Dingo is to be projected on the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art.Credit: Vivid Sydney

Kiss of Light

The Sydney Opera House will come alive with designs by artist and HIV/AIDS activist David McDiarmid, 30 years after his death. The seven-minute projection Kiss of Light is drawn from McDiarmid’s vibrant artistic practice and heralded as a declaration of identity, love and protest.

Coming to Vivid: David McDiarmid’s Kiss of Light.Credit: Sydney Opera House

Drawn in Light

Dutch sculptor Ralf Westerhof, from Light Art Collection, is known for his skyward sketches with light. For his Vivid installation at Circular Quay, Westerhof has been inspired by a child’s cot mobile to create a floating chandelier that looks as though it is hand-drawn. The huge mobile sways and rotates gently with the breeze.

Inspired by a child’s musical mobile, Drawn in Light is being installed at Darling Harbour from Saturday.Credit: Vivid Sydney

Error

Resembling the swirling chaos of the universe, this massive, illuminated disc appears to hover, its surface pulsing with random bursts of light. Also from Light Art Collection, it glitches to suggest the potential for creativity, change and new discoveries in the unpredictable.

Vivid Sydney runs from May 23 to June 14.

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