The last time Aurora came to town in 2015, the biennial light and media art exhibition flooded the Dallas Arts District with more than 50,000 people. Its wild popularity came with growing pains: frustratingly long lines, crowded spaces, overlooked artwork. After an extra year off in 2017, the festival returns to Dallas this week with a new game plan.
Aurora makes its debut at City Hall’s plaza on Saturday, a departure from its former home in the Dallas Arts District. (This is its first year as an independent festival after splitting off from AT&T Performing Arts Center.) The 2018 exhibition, titled “Future Worlds,” also introduces Aurora’s new curatorial team: Justine Ludwig, former chief curator at the Dallas Contemporary who’s now executive director at New York’s Creative Time; New York-based curator and art consultant DooEun Choi; Berlin-based curator and art historian Nadim Samman; and Dallas-based curator and writer Danielle Avram.
Festivities actually began Tuesday as part of Aurora Expanded, new programming highlighting local artists and five different areas of the city (more on that later). While Aurora has begun to blossom into a weeklong, city-wide affair, it’s also shrunken significantly.
This year’s Aurora will have less art – like a lot less – than previous years. That’s not to say it will have any less impact. Where the main event featured about 80 artworks in 2015, this year it’ll have only 16. The idea is for people to actually be able to see every piece.
“Before, people were racing through to try to see everything. The attention and scale that each one should be getting, you lose that when you have 80 pieces,” says Monica Salazar, Aurora’s director of programming. “I think this is more feasible for people to really get their heads around, but also hang out and talk with friends.”
The art will still have the immersive, experiential quality that’s made Aurora so likable over the years. Refik Anadol’s Melting Memories will transform the walls of I.M. Pei’s iconic Dallas City Hall with a massive projection inspired by motor movements inside the human brain. Meanwhile, Miguel Chevalier will bring an interactive, 7,000-square-foot virtual reality experience to City Hall Plaza with Digital Icons.
Other participating artists of note include Simon Mullan, who will stage an sound-focused installation of eight automobiles in a circle titled Continuous Power; Paula Crown, whose Freezing Rain will create a surreal landscape at nearby Pioneer Plaza; and Danielle Georgiou Dance Group and Magnús Sigurðarson, who will present Dances with Whales (Keiko – Always on my Mind) at the the Kay Bailey Hutchison Dallas Convention Center. These are all part of Saturday’s program, which will span 54 acres of Downtown Dallas around City Hall.
“One great thing about our new footprint is that it gives us a fresh new area to work with,” says Pennington. “It’s always been our plan to expand beyond the Arts District. Our aim all along was to become a city-wide project that expands beyond downtown.”
Aurora Expanded is a big step toward that goal. Each of the Aurora Expanded events takes place in an art venue of a different neighborhood – Bishop Arts, Deep Ellum, the Design District – and each highlights a local artist. The Office of Cultural Affairs worked with Aurora to fund grants for the artists, who were chosen by a different curatorial committee than Aurora’s main event.
“It really helps focus on Dallas-based artists,” says Pennington.
Highlights of Aurora Expanded include Carmen Menza’s multi-sensory installation, The Velocity of Light – A Kaleidoscopic Journey, on view at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science from November 3 through January 6; Tramaine Townsend’s Suspense, the artist’s first-ever performance piece, on view at Arts Mission Oak Cliff this Thursday evening; and Jim Lively’s video installation Still Mad as Hell, which will show at The Cedars Union on Saturday night.
The list goes on; see for yourself. The volume of art may be pared down, Aurora is still shining bright.
