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View all search resultsLooking after the dark: Bandung’s light festival reimagines the city
Bandung’s heritage warehouses light up as artists explore the space between shadow and illumination.
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Light pathways: A visitor walks past Resonora, an installation by OSTUDIO X Dearista, on Oct. 3, 2025, during .BDG Lights 2025 at Laswi Heritage, Bandung. Featuring at least 25 creators, the city-scale light festival marked the opening of the Bandung Design Biennale 2025, held from Oct. 3-25, and included exhibitions, talks and gatherings of international creative networks. (JP/Adi Marsiela)
T
he .BDG Lights 2025 festival opened this year’s 5th Bandung Design Biennale (BDB), transforming the old Laswi Heritage warehouse complex into a playground of light, sound and reflection.
Held from Oct. 3 to 5, the three-day event served as the opening act of the biennale, which ran until Oct. 25 across Bandung.
The festival’s theme, Menata Gelap (Looking after the Dark), invited artists and designers to rethink what darkness means to the city, not as an absence, but as a condition full of potential.
“Darkness can be explored as a source of ideas and imagination,” said Prananda L. Malasan, curator of BDB 2025 and an assistant professor at Bandung Institute of Technology’s (ITB) Art and Design Faculty ahead of the festival’s opening.
The organizers brought together 25 collectives and artists to explore the relationship between light and shadow in Bandung’s urban spaces.
Among them, artist Dearista, in collaboration with OSTUDIO, presented Resonora, an installation made of plain, recycled fabric sheets illuminated by shifting projections of color. The hues, derived from sound recordings taken across different corners of the city, turned the space into a glowing acoustic landscape. Visitors moved among suspended cloths, immersed in a sensory reconstruction of the city’s layered moods.
