02.05—
11.10.2026

# Aurora
Programme

Annual Survey · Issue No. 04
01 / 08

A room is a slow argument with the sun. We have spent four years listening for what it answers.

From the Aurora Charter, 2023
02 / 08
Strands · 2026
Programme
Six interlocking strands run across the year. Each is independently curated, but every strand answers to the same question: what does light know that we don't?
Strand · Title · Anchor
01

### Slow Atmospheres

A reading room of long-form essays, drawings and weather notebooks, organised around the changing yellow of late afternoon.

02

### Public Form

Three commissions in three pavilions, each examining how a public square wears its own light over the course of a season.

03

### Field Notes

A residency programme drawing artists, architects and meteorologists together for a hundred days of recording, drawing and arguing.

04

### Quiet Editions

A typographic publishing strand committed to printing only what asks to be read in daylight, on warm paper, slowly.

05

### Open Conversations

Twelve evenings of public talks, paired with a meal and a question: what is the weather like in your work?

03 / 08
First Chapter — Slow Atmospheres
01
A reading of the season's quietest hours

In its first chapter the Aurora Programme convenes around the slowest light of the year: the long minutes after the sun has gone but before the room has admitted it. We open the year in March, in three rooms, in three cities, with three lamps left burning past closing.

04 / 08
Public attendance
Open programme · 2022—2026
182k
Visitors · Year four
A 2.4× rise on the inaugural year, drawn from a programme that grew slower than the audience.
74%
Returning audience
Three quarters of last year's visitors came back; nearly half came back twice.
2022
76,400
2023
112,800
2024
141,200
2025
164,900
2026
182,300
05 / 08
A note from the curator

The yellow we use is not the yellow we mean. It is the yellow that arrives ten minutes after we leave the building.

Idun Reijners
Curator-at-large, Aurora Institute · letter to the editorial board, January 2026
¨
06 / 08
Public calendar
Selected dates · May—October
Date
Title
Venue
Length
02.05
The Long Yellow, opening lecture
Pavilion of Quiet Form, Rotterdam
90 min
17.05
A walk through the season's first room
Reading Garden, Pavilion North
2 hr
06.06
Public Form 01 — opening
Square of the Slow Sun, Antwerp
All day
28.06
Field Notes residency, week one supper
House of the Half Window
3 hr
19.07
A Letter to the Sun, evening reading
Aurora Library, room 3
75 min
14.08
Quiet Editions — print fair & book launch
Type Garden, Pavilion South
2 days
22.09
Open Conversations · meteorology & drawing
Reading Room, ground floor
2 hr
11.10
The Last Window, closing performance
Pavilion of Quiet Form, Rotterdam
60 min
07 / 08
Colophon · Programme 04

## With thanks
to the slow
readers.

Curated by
Idun Reijners
with the editorial board
Designed
In daylight, on warm paper,
over fourteen weeks
Hosts
Aurora Institute
Pavilion of Quiet Form
Reading Garden
Until next year
The fifth programme opens in May 2027. Look for the yellow on the door.
08 / 08