Lumiere 2023: Crowds flock to Durham and Bishop Auckland

Dazzling artworks from over 14 countries around the world feature in Lumiere 2023, with Durham and Bishop Auckland brightening up across four days.

Tens of thousands of visitors are expected to visit the festival to enjoy a programme led by world-renowned artists Ai Weiwei and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and featuring over 40 installations.

Durham Cathedral, bridges, buildings have been transformed with a range of imaginative artworks.

Director of Artichoke and Lumiere's artistic director Helen Marriage said: “This year's programme is an amazing mixture of community-generated projects, where local people are working with national and international artists as well as a full international programme.

“This amounts to artists travelling from 14 different countries here to Lumiere.”

She added: “Living in a place as beautiful as Durham, you can take things for granted as its familiar because you walk the streets of it every day.

“What our artists do is they look at Durham with fresh eyes, just for this brief four-day window they turn the city in to something magical.

“If you can physically transform a place, you can change the way people feel about it, who they share it with and what that experience is like.”

Outside the Cathedral on Palace Green, Spanish artist Javier Riera has created an immersive series of three-dimensional projections titled Liquid Geometry.

Moving across the buildings in hypnotic patterns, the mesmerising shapes transform the look of the Cathedral, twirling into mandala-looking circular shapes.

On display inside the Cathedral’s 11th-century Chapter House is Ai Weiwei’s Illuminated Bottle Rack, made up of tens of antique chandeliers that reportedly arrived in Durham piece by piece in over 60 boxes.

The 2018 work by the Chinese-born artist is making its UK premiere at this year's Lumiere.

Inside the Cathedral Nave, a unique pulse-influenced installation which sees hundreds of lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling will light up the historic site.

By placing their hands underneath a sensor, visitors heartbeats will sound inside the Nave's echoed chamber.

Since 2009, Lumiere in Durham has attracted more than one million visitors and stands as a landmark event in the cultural calendar of the North East - generating an estimated £37million for the region over the years.