PARTING SHOT | Nocturnal wonderland

Who wouldn’t want a reason to wander around a wine farm in the dark? Spier wine farm delivers a very good one this March and April for its eighth edition of Spier Light Art, transforming the manicured civility of a Stellenbosch estate into a nocturnal, fantastical dream. By day, Spier is everything you’d expect — beautiful grounds and vines planted in neat rows with Cape Dutch buildings sunning themselves, their whitewash like sunscreen. By night, it glows, flickers and occasionally takes your breath away.

Running from March 6 to April 6 2026, the exhibition has been assembled by curators Vaughn Sadie and Jay Pather, who’ve selected 21 artists to probe everything from environmental collapse to post-apartheid disillusionment. If that sounds earnest, it is. Light art, Sadie insists, is “more than illumination: it’s a lens through which we perceive, reflect and question the world”. Which is curator-speak for: don’t just look, think.

Unlike the anaemic shuffle of a conventional gallery, there’s no prescribed route. You wander. You get lost. You follow a glow through the trees and find yourself confronted by something that looks festive but probably isn’t. Sadie calls it “the sensual and ephemeral interplay of light and sound” — or an art treasure hunt for insomniacs.

Take Kenneth Shandu’s When the Sky Falls: illuminated umbrellas suspended against a soundtrack of rain. On the surface, it’s a lyrical meditation on climate change. But Pather is blunt — for him it speaks less about weather and more about service delivery. Khayelitsha floods each winter while transformation slouches. The umbrellas become not just symbols of protection but indictments objectified. In SA, even rain is political.

Elsewhere, neon bites back. Joe Turpin’s glowing EISH captures the national exhale of frustration with a single vernacular sigh. Mawande Ka Zenzile’s UBUGQI reframes the electric flicker as intuitive awakening, marrying global neon aesthetics with indigenous mysticism. It’s a reminder that enlightenment can be spiritual and fluorescent.

Light art is more than illumination: it’s a lens through which we perceive, reflect and question the world. - Vaughn Sadie

There are international guests too. Swiss artist Florian Bach’s Spill floods a riverbank with industrial lamps, transforming nature into an interrogation room. It’s surveillance masquerading as sculpture — brightness as intrusion. His compatriot Kerim Seiler presents a dynamic lattice of blinking tetrahedrons that feels like a spaceship that’s lost its way and decided to hover among the vines.

Memory, that very South African of preoccupations, threads through the exhibition. David Brown’s Dog Watch I channels apartheid-era violence into sculptural form, while Thando Mama revisits 1994 in a multi-media meditation on resilience and the slow erosion of euphoria.

What makes Spier Light Art particularly compelling is its refusal to dictate a theme while still acknowledging the obvious: light determines privilege. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who walks safely at night, who doesn’t. The curators speak of “shared thematics” emerging organically from the open call. In practice, this means infrastructure and ecology rubbing shoulders; technology alongside ancestral ritual.

Then there is the simple pleasure of the exhibition. Sadie notes that it’s “a rare opportunity to step away from the glare of screens”. He’s right. We spend our lives bathed in the anaesthetic blue of devices. Here, light regains its elemental strangeness as visitors drift together under trees, transfixed by glowing objects, briefly united in their observations.

Spier has always understood hospitality. With Light Art, it’s discovered something rarer: hospitality for doubt. You may arrive expecting pretty lanterns among the vines. You leave having considered flooding, inequality, colonial residue, and the possibility that neon can carry both sarcasm and salvation.

Where light becomes art? Perhaps. More interestingly, where art becomes a torch — briefly illuminating how we got here and how we’ll find our way back through the dark.