Night Light

Studio: Amsterdam

Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded studio DRIFT in 2007. With a multidisciplinary team of 64, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances.

DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.

With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is and explore a positive scenario for the future.

DRIFT has created numerous exhibitions and projects around the world. Their work has been exhibited at Victoria & Albert Museum (2009, 2015), Met Museum (2010), Stedelijk Museum (2018), UTA Artist Space (2019), Garage Museum (2019), Mint Museum (2019), Biennale di Venezia (2015), and Pace Gallery (2017), among others. Their work is held in the permanent collections of the LACMA, Rijksmuseum, SFMOMA, Stedelijk Museum, and Victoria & Albert Museum.

In 2014, DRIFT was awarded the Arte Laguna Prize, Venice. In 2019, DRIFT won the Dezeen awards for Designer of the Year and Lighting Design of the Year.

Studio: London

Simon Heijdens reinterprets natural processes with unique technologies and embeds these in man-made surroundings, to create mechanisms that reveal the hidden essence of a place.

He creates artworks that continuously transform and evolve in response to their surroundings, affected by meteorological conditions such as sunlight and wind, and human interaction. While technically complex, his installations are understated and poetic in appearance, gracefully balancing between the visible and the visible, and seamlessly integrated into their environment.

His works are part of the permanent collections of museums such as MoMA New York, the Art Institute Chicago, Boijmans van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, and V&A London, and shown at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Haus der Kunst Munich and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art Moscow, among others.

Large scale commissions include Shade for the Art Institute Chicago (2010) and the opening commission of the V&A London’s Sainsbury Gallery (2014), Silent Room (2016) for SXSW Texas, the Perrier Jouet commission for Art Basel / Design Miami, and the Museum cafe for the Boijmans van Beuningen museum Rotterdam (2008).

Studio: Brussels

Joanie Lemercier is a French artist working primarily with projections of light in space, often using unconventional screens such as water mist, hand-drawn landscapes or building façades.

At age five, he attended classes on digital fabric design taught by his mother. The threads of his early education grounded his interest in physical structures: geometry, patterns and minimalist forms. As Lemercier’s work evolved, he began to approach formal experiments from the perspective of physics and philosophy, examining how light can be used to manipulate perceived reality. Lermercier concerns himself with metaphysical questions – the relationship between perception and reality, between space and time – and expresses reverence towards the natural world and our place within it. Recently, the artist has brought his passion for climate activism more overtly into his artistic work.

Over the last 15 years, Lemercier has worked on stage designs, architectural projections and artistic installations. He has collaborated with artists, including Flying Lotus and Portishead’s Adrian Utley, and has been exhibited at the China Museum of Digital Art in Beijing, Art Basel Miami and the Sundance Film Festival, among other venues around the world. The Fundación Telefónica in Madrid hosted his first large solo show in 2021.

Studio: Rome

Quayola employs technology as a lens to explore the tensions and equilibriums between seemingly opposing forces: the real and artificial, figurative and abstract, old and new.

Constructing immersive installations, often at historically significant architectural sites, he engages with and re-imagines canonical imagery through contemporary technology.Hellenistic sculpture, old master painting and Baroque architecture are some of the historical aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola’s abstract compositions. His varied practice, all deriving from custom computer software, also includes audiovisual performance, video, sculpture and works on paper.

Past exhibitions of his work of work include V&A Museum, London; Park Avenue Armory, New York; Bozar, Brussels; National Art Center, Tokyo; UCCA, Beijing; How Art Museum, Shanghai; SeMA, Seoul; Bienal, São Paulo; Triennale, Milan; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain; British Film Institute, London; Cité de la Musique, Paris; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux, France; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; Elektra Festival, Montreal; Sonar Festival, Barcelona and Sundance Film Festival.

Also a frequent collaborator on musical projects, Quayola has worked with composers, orchestras and musicians, including London Contemporary Orchestra, National Orchestra of Bordeaux, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Vanessa Wagner, Jamie XX, Mira Calix, Plaid and Tale Of Us.

In 2013, Quayola was awarded the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica.

Studio: Tel Aviv and New York

Michal Rovner is an Israeli artist best known for her works that address tension and vulnerability through photography, film, installation and video.

The artist often takes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in her work. She uses historical objects or symbols associated with either side and then alters them beyond recognition, so they lose their meaning both conceptually and visually. "I think that good art is an abstraction of reality. For me, I like to keep some presence of reality within the abstraction."

This is exemplified in her 2006 work Makom (Place), where the artist used stones from destroyed and dismantled Israeli and Palestinian homes. She worked with artisans from both sides of the conflict to create new unified spaces.

Born in 1957 in Tel Aviv, Israel, the artist studied cinema, television and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her works are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.