A Museum Closed in 2016 Has Just Reopened as Durham's Contemporary Art Centre

Ten years is a long time for a building to sit empty. When Durham County Council shut the Durham Light Infantry Museum and Art Gallery in 2016, declaring it too expensive to maintain, the decision drew petitions from the descendants of DLI veterans and a good deal of local anger. The Modernist 1960s block at Aykley Heads, set in mature parkland on the edge of the city, became one of those places people drove past and shook their heads about.

On Saturday 22 August it opened again, under a new name and a very different remit. The Light is now a centre for culture and contemporary art, following a £17m redevelopment by the architects NORR, and it launched with an exhibition of light-based work by Tracey Emin, Dan Flavin, Steve McQueen, Olafur Eliasson, Liz West and Chila Burman. For anyone who follows the fortunes of regional arts infrastructure in this country, that is a genuinely unusual sentence to write in 2026.

What’s actually in the building

The Light has three galleries for temporary and touring shows plus one given over to a permanent interactive display, We Are The Durhams: The Durham Light Infantry Exhibition. The rest of the DLI collection has gone to The Story, the county’s archive and museum nearby, which is a sensible division of labour: the regimental material gets a proper research home, and the gallery spaces are freed up for a programme that can change.

The inaugural exhibition is Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light, curated by Natasha Howes, running until 17 January 2027. It traces artists using light as an actual material — not as illumination, but as the thing the work is made of — from the 1960s to now. Flavin’s Untitled (to Don Judd, colourist) 1-5 from 1987 anchors the historical end. At the other end sit two new commissions: an interactive piece by Tine Bech, and a work by Katrin Hanusch built from broken laptop screens that responds directly to the architecture of the gallery.

That last detail is worth pausing on. A sculpture made of dead screens, in a building named for light, in a county that gave the world Joseph Swan’s electric bulb. The exhibition title borrows from the Russian Futurist opera of 1913, which is a fairly confident bit of curatorial signalling for a new venue’s opening act.

The naming is not arbitrary either. Durham’s relationship with light runs improbably deep: Bede worked out lunar calculations in the region 1,300 years ago; Swan, a Sunderland man, was demonstrating incandescent lamps before Edison had them to market; and Durham University helped build instruments for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Howes makes the accessibility case plainly, describing light art as sensory, colourful and atmospheric — a medium that does not require you to have read anything first.

Why this matters beyond Durham

The Light’s director Tony Guillan describes light as “a vehicle of inquiry, and a way of perceiving and situating ourselves in the world,” and frames the centre’s job as being outward-looking while staying grounded in its own locality. He also says something rather more candid: “A cultural centre has to be all things to everyone when operating in today’s challenging financial climate.”

He is not wrong, and the funding structure shows it. Durham County Council is the primary funder, alongside the urban regeneration partner MUSE and Arts Council England, with the whole thing folded into a wider Durham Innovation District strategy. This is not a museum built because a museum was wanted. It is a museum built because it earns its place in an economic development plan.

There is an awkward counterpoint here. Durham’s Lumiere festival — for years the largest light art event in the UK, and the single thing most people outside the North East associated with the city culturally — held its final edition in 2025, cut by the previous Lib Dem–Conservative coalition council. The Light is, in a sense, the permanent replacement for something temporary that was working. Whether a year-round building can do what a biennial festival did for footfall and civic mood is an open question, and a fair one to ask.

What to expect if you go

The DLI display and the museum itself are free to enter, with ticket charges applying to temporary exhibitions and events — a hybrid model that is becoming standard among regional institutions trying to keep the doors genuinely open while still generating income. Guillan promises an ambitious programme of exhibitions, immersive experiences and new commissions to follow.

For independent galleries and artists across the North East, the more interesting prospect is what a venue of this scale changes locally. County Durham has not previously had a space dedicated to contemporary art of national and international standing. Institutions like this tend to pull an ecosystem along behind them: touring shows arrive, artists get commissioned, smaller spaces find they suddenly have visitors who came for something else and stayed. Middlesbrough’s mima is hosting the Turner Prize this year. Newcastle and Gateshead have Baltic and the Laing. A Durham anchor point makes the region legible as a circuit rather than a set of separate stops.

Victory Over the Sun: Encounters with Light is at The Light, Aykley Heads, Durham, until 17 January 2027.