The seventh AURORA Biennial runs from 1 to 21 November 2026 under the joint curatorship of Julia Kaganskiy (New York) and Tairone Bastien (Toronto). The edition marks the expansion of AURORA from the all-night exhibition format that has defined the institution since its 2010 founding into a three-week citywide festival of installations, performances and talks, culminating on 21 November in the all-night biennial exhibition across the I.M. Pei-designed Dallas City Hall, the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library and the AT&T Discovery District.
AURORA is Dallas's signature biennial of art, technology and community — founded in 2010 by the artists Shane Pennington and Joshua King, with the veteran Dallas arts advocate Veletta Forsythe Lill as third co-founder, as a single-night pop-up exhibition staged for the Cedars Open Studios in the warehouse district immediately south of downtown. The founding bet was modest: a late-night programme centred on the art of light, video and sound, organised by working Dallas artists for working Dallas audiences, operating outside the gallery and museum circuit and admitted free of charge. The 2010 inaugural drew roughly 1,400 attendees to a single warehouse night at Dallas Heritage Village on 19 November 2010. The 2011 follow-up — the second annual edition, staged on 28 October 2011 — relocated the programme from the Cedars warehouse district to the Dallas Arts District for the first time, with more than seventy artists across the nineteen-block downtown footprint. The 2024 edition, the sixth, took over significant sites across downtown Dallas with installations by twenty-six commissioned artists and was attended by tens of thousands.
The 2026 edition, the seventh, opens on 1 November 2026 and runs for three weeks under the joint curatorship of Julia Kaganskiy (an independent curator and cultural strategist who served as the founding director of NEW INC at the New Museum from 2014 to 2018 and is now executive director of Eyebeam) and Tairone Bastien (an independent curator long associated with the early editions of Performa in New York and with the inaugural and second editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art). The expansion to a three-week format is the institutional argument the AURORA organisation has been building toward across the post-2018 cycle: that the long single-night exhibition format which made AURORA's reputation can be extended into a programme of sustained public engagement without forfeiting the all-night culminating event that has been the institution's signature form since 2010.
From the Cedars warehouse to the Pei plaza
The structural feature that distinguishes AURORA from the older European biennials of light and digital art (Lyon's Fête des Lumières, the Luminale in Frankfurt, the Amsterdam Light Festival) is the long, organic transition from an artist-organised pop-up to a permanent contemporary art biennial institution operating with international curatorial collaborators. The 2013 edition, Light of Convergence, was the institutional moment at which the programme outgrew its warehouse origins: over ninety artworks were installed across a sixty-eight-acre footprint of the Dallas Arts District, with more than thirty thousand attendees over a single night. The 2015 edition, All Together Now, expanded the curatorial structure by dividing the nineteen-block Dallas Arts District footprint into sections curated by Carson Chan, Tim Goossens, Julia Kaganskiy, Joshua King, Aja Martin and Shane Pennington, and drew an estimated fifty thousand attendees. The institutional crisis of 2015 — that the programme had grown beyond the safe capacity of its Arts District venue — led to the 2018 edition's relocation to the Government District and the architectural pivot that has defined AURORA's mature form.
The 2018 edition, Future Worlds, was curated by Danielle Avram (Dallas), Justine Ludwig (then senior curator at Dallas Contemporary), DooEun Choi (New York) and Nadim Samman (Berlin), with the I.M. Pei-designed Dallas City Hall plaza serving as the institutional architectural anchor of the programme for the first time. The 2024 edition, FuturePresentPast, was curated by Kendal Henry (New York) and Leslie Moody Castro (Austin and Mexico City) and developed across 16 November 2024 with installations by twenty-six artists; the curatorial argument took the North Texas region's shared experiences as its subject, looking into the past to shape the future through the present, with sub-themes addressing community connection, health advocacy, environmental sustainability and the urban transformation of displacement and migration. The 2026 expansion to a three-week format is the institution's next move beyond the single-night all-night format — and the seventh edition's announced commitment to international curatorial partnership (Kaganskiy from New York; Bastien from Toronto) is the continuing institutional argument that AURORA, founded by Dallas artists for Dallas audiences, can hold its position as a continuing programme of international weight from the Government District of downtown Dallas.
