Art, light, dolphins, and ‘doof’ energy: Adelaide’s Illuminate goes all in
From inflatable dolphins perched on scaffolding to light portals in the botanic gardens and a tech-free lunch in the hills, Illuminate Adelaide is turning the city into a surreal playground of sound, light, and sensory overload.
‘Dolphin, rhythm, function,” an artist shouts from atop a cross-shaped scaffolding structure wrapped in an almost dizzying number of cords. At his side, two inflatable dolphins are wedged into the top tier. Below, chaos unfolds: performers run, dance, twirl, LED screens flashing cryptic words disappear into velvet drapes, shout into microphones and even play rounds of Call of Duty.
It’s a scene straight out of someone’s dreamscape or, as multidisciplinary light artist House Of Vnholy titles it, one’s Ecstatic Utopian Fantasy. It is part of the Illuminate Adelaide festival, which, since July 2, has turned the city into a laboratory for the senses, where the strange, the beautiful and the unlikely collide.
As part of the City of Adelaide’s ART POD Residency, House of Vnholy (Matthew Adey) installed a series of screens in the ART POD windows from June 18, flashing large text hints toward a synthesised utopian event that culminated in a performance on July 5. The show was largely improvised and accompanied by a barrage of video feeds, live cameras, and noise.
Described as a “series of sculptural interventions”, the piece is a collaborative effort between Adey and artists including Messianic Gloss, Capital Waste Pictures, Miles Dunne, Jazmine Deng, extreme metal vocalist, Karina Utomo, and Marcus Ian McKenzie, intended to explore “ecstatic utopias” through light, sound, postmodern movement and speculative world-building.
Now in its fifth year, the Illuminate festival has steadily become a highlight of Adelaide’s winter calendar. Co-founders Rachael Azzopardi and Lee Cumberlidge are veterans of the arts world, and its program stretches across a network of projections, installations, late-night pop-ups, and immersive audiovisual experiences.
Long known for its world-class festivals, Adelaide has leaned into its reputation as a cultural playground, from the established prestige of the Adelaide Festival and Writers’ Week to the chaos of Adelaide Fringe.
But what’s changed in recent years is the shift toward the multidisciplinary and the experimental.
“We’ve worked in performing arts and led major festivals before,” Illuminate Adelaide co-creator Lee Cumberlidge says.
“But Illuminate is a step in a new direction – blending technology, light, sound and art across such a broad program is a different kind of challenge. It’s an extension of what we’ve done in a new dimension.”
Illuminate is less about watching and more about being inside something. It doesn’t require you to “get” the art, it just asks you to feel it.
Take Night Visions, an all-new after-dark experience that transforms Adelaide Botanic Gardens into a series of parallel worlds with works that offer a blend of cutting-edge light, lasers, projections and sound. If the goal was to open a portal to other realities, Night Visions (tickets $45) delivers in spades. What’s more, it marks a milestone for the festival – the first time its centrepiece has been crafted almost entirely by an Australian team, including Robin Fox, Craig Walsh, Chris Petridis and Jayden Sutherland, underscoring a strong local creative presence at the heart of the event.
As The Australian approaches the pulsing sound in the gardens, it is impossible not to feel the fluttering excitement of stepping into a bush doof – the unmistakeable thrill that signals a good night ahead.
At the beginning of Night Visions is Monuments, a site-responsive installation by the internationally acclaimed Walsh: trees throughout the gardens are transformed into monumental kinetic sculptures, illuminated with portraits of five First Nations individuals – Jeremy Johncock, Uncle Mickey Kumatpi Marrutya O’Brien, Dr Jenni Caruso, Natasha Wanganeen and Jack Buckskin – whose lives and work continue to inspire and shape their communities. The projection is designed to challenge traditional expectations of public monuments and the selective history represented in Australia’s civic spaces.
As visitors wander deeper into the gardens, the beams of light Sutherland’s Urban Echoes sends flickering across the landscape are reminiscent of an old film projector. The installation explores communication in the natural world and how those patterns are reflected, disrupted or reshaped in urban environments. Whether or not patrons grasp the concept, it is undeniably beautiful.
Inside the Bicentennial Conservatory, Fox’s Canopy offers an immersive audiovisual journey, while elsewhere in the gardens Petridis’s Fracture creates a prism of light for visitors to walk through. For anyone sceptical about the “parallel worlds” theme of the exhibition, these works firmly seal the deal. The festival’s free program also has also plenty to offer. City Lights stretches from Adelaide’s East End down to Festival Plaza, offering free interactive installations as well as roaming performances.
FierS à Cheval, by France’s Compagnie des Quidams, in which a group of dancers transforms into a group of illuminated inflatable horses in the forecourt of Bonython Hall, at first seems totally bizarre, but is a performance that sends audiences gasping in delight, phones flashing.
Just inside the hall is SomniUs, an interactive artwork by UK-based studio illumaphonium, featuring over six metres of suspended LEDs and nearly a thousand light bars. The immersive field pattern of light and sound shifts in response to the audience’s movement below.
Also on North Terrace is moonGarden by Montreal-based Lucion, a mesmerising installation of 19 giant glowing spheres – each offering its own interactive surprise. Since debuting at Montreal’s Luminothérapie festival in 2012, moonGarden has toured globally, lighting up events from Lyon’s Fête des Lumières to New York, Moscow, Mexico City, and Beijing.
Among the festival’s highlights this year was a daytime event: The Offline Club’s Offline Lunch at Papershell Farm, in the Adelaide Hills. Held on July 7, it offered a counterpoint to Illuminate’s main program, intended to provide, as Cumberlidge says, the “new and unexpected” throughout this year’s program.
The “offline experience”, created in Amsterdam by Jordy van Bennekom, Valentijn Klok and Ilya Kneppelhourt, started as a viral experiment in 2022 but became a full-time mission for the trio, who quit their day jobs to reconnect people with themselves and each other completely unplugged: no technology allowed.
The iteration they brought to the farm, owned by former Empire of the Sun guitarist Surahn Sidhu, started with the trio collecting phones at the gate, to be locked away for four hours.
The sprawling property was a content creator’s dream with a bar, a band room, and even two overly friendly chickens wandering freely, making it a surprisingly tough sell to hand over the forbidden devices.
“Damn, that would be the perfect angle,” someone muttered.
Then came the plunge: an hour of complete silence. Luckily, there were board games scattered about, a table stocked with creative activities such as postcard-making, and a fully stocked bar. Once allowed to chat again, what followed was a laid-back few hours filled with good food, laughter and even a solo performance from Sidhu in the band room.
The Offline Club’s festival events yet to come, with the same structure, include Offline Hangout: McGregors, which is on Saturday, costing $25 and on Sunday, LUMEN Unplugged at Adelaide University’s LUMEN Bar with live harp and vinyl ($35).
“There are boundary-pushing elements to all of (it),” Cumberlidge says.
Day or night, variety is the key to Illuminate. It doesn’t try to be just one thing. It’s weird and family-friendly. It’s niche and noisy. It’s quiet and chaotic.
It understands that Adelaide’s cultural scene is broad, spanning experimental art, popular culture and the sometimes purely Instagrammable.
And rather than picking one lane, it joyfully swerves between them all.
Illuminate Adelaide runs until July 20.
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