LIGHT WINDOWS / Icelandic window (Covid-19 project)

Artists share light to send a message of unity and hope.

During the month of May, artworks will be illuminated in windows around the world.

With cultural spaces closed, LIGHT WINDOWS is an exhibition created by artists at home and by galleries illuminating work through their windows.

Each art window offers inspiration to passers-by.

Light has the ability to reach out while we isolate within cities.  While many places have been boarded up these projects are beacons of inspiration.  LIGHT WINDOWS brings art to hyper-local audiences as well as forging an international community.

The project continues to grow as a gesture of unity across closed borders.

LIGHT WINDOWS is an exhibition for neighbors, a thank you to essential workers, and a tribute to those who we have lost to COVID-19.  Explore the map of artworks, tune in for the International Day of Light live streams, and get creative lighting up your window on May 16.

Statement for Giuseppe Santagata installation:

Icelandic window (Covid-19 project) 

Since the Renaissance, the window has been a useful metaphor for painters, who imagined the surface of the canvas as a window through which they saw the story to be told. Windows, physical or virtual, are often our gateway to parallel universes. The lockdown caused by Covid-19 has only accentuated this situation by forcing people from all over the world into confinement. Creating an even deeper space between what is inside and what is outside. Worlds through which to watch a life continue to pass. 

Icelandic health officials have used voluntary home-based quarantines for all residents returning from defined high-risk areas and for all the people suspected to be in contact with infected people. A large part of Iceland’s small population has been in quarantine. 

In Icelandic culture the windows are meticulously decorated like small open-air galleries. Since a ban on public gatherings took effect, Icelandic have placed teddy bears and other stuffed animals to the delight of passers-by to allow children, who are walking with their parents, to search for teddy bears in windows and count the ones they see. 

Nevertheless, at the same time, windows in Iceland protect the privacy of those who live inside them with extreme caution. They are made of dark glass and you rarely get a glimpse of its residents. Living during this period in Iceland and having the chance to take long solitary walks, I tried to turn this vision, investigating from the outside into the inside, showing the surface of these worlds that hide micro-stories and traces of this difficult period.