Amsterdam Light Festival opened on 27 November and will bring a new series of light artworks to the city centre until 18 January 2026. For this fourteenth edition, curators Pam Toonen and Christopher Grabski chose the theme Legacy, an exploration of the traces people leave behind in their daily lives and in the city they inhabit.
The theme is approached from a broad, personal perspective. Legacy here does not refer to monumental history, but to recognisable forms of inheritance: habits you learn at home, small rituals that are repeated through generations, and objects or stories that continue to carry meaning. This subtlety is the common thread running through the twenty light artworks on display this year.
The festival once again emphasises its character as a creators’ festival. For a whole year, artists, technicians and partners work intensively together on installations that must be suitable for the dynamics of public space. This requires robust materials, technical precision and a design that takes the environment into account. Many works have been developed specifically for their location or adapted to it, with the aim of making the city itself part of the artwork.
The selection for Edition 14 consists of a mix of submissions via an Open Call, directly commissioned works, and curated works from the Netherlands and abroad. This results in a diverse composition in which international artists such as Marinella Senatore, SpY, Xinyi Wang, and Alicia Eggert stand alongside Dutch talents such as Jop Vissers Vorstenbosch and Beeldjutters. Their contributions range from monumental light constructions to subtle projections and digital experiments, all fitting within the narrative that the curators want to tell this year.
As every year, the artworks are temporarily present in the city. This ties in with the theme of Legacy: the works disappear afterwards, but the experience that visitors gain often lingers. Those impressions and conversations show how legacy can also take an intangible form.
Photography: Janus van den Eijnden
