The Golden Horn Light Festival is a large-scale public art event that reimagines Istanbul’s historic Golden Horn — once a vital harbor and strategic site of empire — as an active, shifting landscape entangled with history, ecology, and digital infrastructure.
In the age of the Anthropocene, humanity has become a geological force, altering coastlines, mining rare-earth minerals for technological progress, and accelerating ecological change. The festival invites artists to reflect on this entanglement: how environments shape us, and how we, in turn, shape them through technology, ambition, and disruption.
We are looking for video works that resonate with this layered context — whether through speculative aesthetics, poetic abstraction, generative systems, or experimental narratives.
The artworks will explore themes of sustainability, historical narratives, and digital innovation, incorporating elements that reflect the Golden Horn’s myths, evolving landscape, and cultural memory. By merging light, architecture, and technology, the festival fosters a dialogue between past and present, redefining public engagement with contemporary art in Istanbul.
