Exhibited in the Henri A. Termeer Gallery as part of the MIT Museum’s TIME thematic season, Lighten Up! features fifteen artists with eighteen immersive artworks, installations, and experiential environments either specifically conceived or newly adapted for the exhibition, including work by Carsten Höller, Adam Haar Horowitz, Seth Riskin, James Carpenter, Liliane Lijn, Helga Schmid, and more.

The Earth’s rotation creates daily cycles of light and dark that shape every living being. Circadian rhythm is the internal clock in living beings that responds to time-based patterns of light and dark, influencing sleep, alertness, immunity, and mood. Light plays a key role in serving as the brain’s primary signal of time: dawn and dusk in particular are natural synchronizers of biological rhythms. Lighten Up! reveals the beauty of these rhythms and the vital role of daylight, and offers new perspectives on sleep, dreams, and our resulting overall health.

Lighten Up! invites visitors to discover the secrets of biological clocks, explore alternative representations of time, delve into the unicity of one’s activity cycle and probe the mysteries of sleep and dreams.

Lighten Up! is exhibited as part of the MIT Museum’s TIME thematic season. The exhibition was originally organized and presented by EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, Switzerland, curated by Anna Wirz-Justice, Marilyne Andersen, Sarah Kenderdine, and Giulia Bini, and is presented at the MIT Museum in collaboration with the EPFL curatorial team.