LIGHT II

Exhibition: RUAIRÍ O’BRIEN

ACCESS ART SPACE – DOWNTOWN CAIRO

Saturday, 10 January, 7 pm

Access Artspace is delighted to invite you to the opening of LIGHT II – a new exhibition by the renowned ‘light poet’, artist and architect Ruairí O’Brien.

Born in Dublin and working between Dresden and Cairo, O’Brien returns following last year’s success to present a unique “10+6+2+1” configuration. The exhibition features 6 striking new light sculptures—continuing a theme begun in Germany in the early 2000s—alongside 10 large-scale oil paintings, 2 drawings and one immersive installation piece, the “Idea machine,” a concept evolving since 1999. Exploring themes of Love, Time, Balance, and Transparency, these works stand as hopeful, luminous fragments that open onto larger worlds.

Address: 10 Elnabarawi st. Off of champollion st. Downtown , Cairo

More art by Ruairí O’Brien at www.ruairiobrien-artworks.com

LIT Awards 2025

WINNER

Soundless Music

Prize: Winners in Event Lighting Installation

Lighting Design: Ruairí O’Brien . Lichtdesign

Lead Designer: Ruairí O’Brien

The Soundless Music light composition “The Colors of Light and the Thermodynamics of (Urban) Life” transformed 21 architectural landmarks in Potsdam’s city center into a radiant winter journey. For seven hours, rhythmic color changes and media art – incl. a canal laser show and Barberini Museum façade projections – turned the historic city into a living walk through immersive experience for young and old. In condensed seven-minute sequences, shifting moods reflected seasonal cycles, renewal, and transformation. This third part of a trilogy explored tertiary and analogous color harmonies, evoking atmospheres from vibrant joy to quiet reflection. Beyond spectacle, the project showed how light art can invigorate inner cities during the quiet winter months. By drawing locals and visitors into the heritage core, it created community and commerce while respecting energy efficiency and orchestration. Seventy light moods, tailored to each building’s architecture and synchronized across the city, merged science and art: light as natural phenomenon, emotional catalyst, and poetic homage. In January, when cities often struggle for liveliness, Potsdam’s center became an open, shared stage – demonstrating that light, like music, can move the emotions, silently yet powerfully, celebrating public space and making our cities attractive and lively places to be for all citizens at night.

_{Foto: Alexander Rentsch}

LIT Awards 2025

HONORABLE MENTION

Lighting Design Kunstbahnhof Flöha

ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING DESIGN / Interior Architectural Illumination

Lighting Design: Ruairí O’Brien . Lichtdesign

Lead Designer: Ruairí O’Brien

The lighting concept for the historic station concourse in Flöha (Saxony, Germany) combines functional and artistic lighting to create impressive lighting moods with appeal by atmospherically highlighting the impressive architecture of the concourse.The station has been renovated after standing empty for several years. In April this year, it reopened in its new role as a multifunctional art and exhibition hall. The reuse of the existing building is not only removing an eyesore and beautifying the cityscape, but also creating added value for society.
The lighting concept highlights the architectural monument and enables variable lighting for exhibitions, events, and the general traffic safety.
The custom-made LED neon-lines with color control serve as wall-mounted light art and the big window’s wall completes it as architectural light installation with interior and exterior effect. Dynamic colors and scenes can create individual lighting moods, from active daylight or atmospheric warmwhite light to colorful light displays.
The station concourse, which is also one of the program items in Chemnitz 2025–European Capital of Culture, is set to remain a venue for exhibitions and encounters with changing installations and a distinctive nighttime identity beyond the festival year. Flöha Art Station will thus become a lively intersection of mobility, art, and urban life–day and night.

^{Foto: Peter Fischer}

Illuminating Excellence for TU Dresden!

Architectural light installation for Excellence Days at Dresden University of Technology

As part of the Technical University of Dresden’s Excellence Days (11–12 November 2025), we were commissioned to illuminate buildings of historic significance, celebrating the open-air research laboratory and expressing the spirit of The Collaborative University – inventive, transformative, engaged.

As night fell, the historic Mensa building—originally designed by Paul Wolf and later expanded by Karl Wilhelm Ochs—was brought to life in light, symbolically connecting past and future for students, visitors, and the Excellence Commission alike.

It was a privilege to contribute to this inspiring moment in TU Dresden’s ongoing journey toward the title of University of Excellence.
We wish TU Dresden every success!

Jesse Owens Info-Light-Sculpture, Olympic Stadium Berlin

Ruairí O’Brien developed the concept for a place of remembrance in front of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, dedicated to the American track and field athlete James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens. At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Owens won four gold medals in the 100 metres, long jump, 200 metres and 4 × 100 metres relay, becoming the most successful athlete of the Games. His triumph powerfully disproved the racist ideology of National Socialism.

The memorial sculpture combines architecture, light, history and movement to create a spatial experience. A transparent structure in front of the stadium takes the 100-metre track as its narrative line. Reflective and optical elements direct sunlight during the day and, at night, create a precise drawing in light that makes Owens’ run, his speed and the moment of victory tangible. The result is a place between remembrance, perception and physical experience. Visitors do not simply look at a sculpture; they move along a story. Light, reflection, scale and rhythm make speed and time visible — inviting visitors to see, think, read, learn, ask and enjoy.

Lighting concept for Flöha art railway station

Lighting designer Ruairí O’Brien has developed a customised lighting solution for the Kunstbahnhof Flöha that harmoniously combines two central functions:

• Functional lighting that fulfils the usage requirements as a railway station and exhibition venue,
• Artistic staging that atmospherically emphasises the special architecture of the hall.

The individual lighting and colour concept

for the station concourse was developed by Ruairí O’Brien in close collaboration with the town of Flöha and the project lead architect Gert Humburg (responsible for the station refurbishment) especially for this location. It emphasises the clear, high-quality architecture of the station concourse and creates the perfect setting for the exhibition and art installations there as part of Chemnitz, European Capital of Culture 2025 (e.g. Tanja Rochelmeyer’s window front design).

A cultural highlight with sustainable prospects

The Kunstbahnhof Flöha is developing into a cultural centre of supra-regional importance with changing exhibitions. As a special highlight of the Capital of Culture year, it attracts art lovers from all over the region. And beyond 2025, it will remain a lively art venue with regular exhibitions and installations.

Re-Thinking Bismarck

Artificial Eclipse — Light, Shadow, and the Re-Reading of History

The project introduces a large-scale “sun blocker” that casts a moving shadow across the Bismarck monument.
Rather than altering or removing the monument, the intervention reframes it — placing it under a continuous condition of light and darkness.

This artificial eclipse interrupts the monument’s visual authority. At certain moments, the figure is fully illuminated; at others, it is partially or completely obscured.
The monument is no longer a fixed image, but a surface subjected to change.

Light and shadow become a medium of critique. They expose the instability of historical meaning and reflect the evolving nature of public perception — particularly in relation to colonialism, nationalism, and the monument’s reception over time.

A mirror integrated into the disc introduces a second layer of reflection. It reverses the traditional relationship between monument and viewer: instead of being looked up to, the monument is observed from above.

The visitor becomes part of the act of interpretation.

The intervention creates a spatial and atmospheric field — a place of shade, altered temperature, and sensory awareness — where physical experience and critical reflection overlap. Simple in form but precise in effect, the project transforms the monument from a static object into a dynamic condition: a site where history is not only remembered, but actively re-examined.