Multi-sensory exhibition ‘Lighten Up!’ redefines time through art and biology

Among this year’s most incisive MIT Museum events, Lighten Up! On Biology and Time positions the intersection of art and biology within a rigorously sensory framework. On view from October 2025 to August 2026, the exhibition examines how light conditions perception, health, and the temporal rhythms that structure daily life.

Presented in the Henri A. Termeer Gallery as part of the museum’s TIME season, it brings together eighteen works by fifteen artists to explore the relationship between living systems and cycles of light and darkness. Circadian rhythm emerges here not as an abstraction, but as a lived condition—shaping sleep, cognition, and emotional states.

Rather than fixing science as knowledge to be observed, the exhibition renders it experiential. Light operates as both medium and agent, while time is registered not as measurement, but as something felt and inhabited.

Where light becomes time: the poetics of circadian rhythm

One of the most striking works is Hotel Room #2: Communal Dreams by Carsten Höller, Adam Haar Horowitz and Seth Riskin.

This experimental installation turns the museum into a communal sleeping space, where visitors lie within a sculptural structure and are influenced by subtle pulses of light, sound and motion while they dream. Drawing on cutting-edge research, the piece challenges the notion that dreaming is a purely private act, instead suggesting a fragile collective dimension of the unconscious.

Data as portrait: circadian rhythms visualized

Another notable piece from the project is Circadian Rhythms by Kirell Benzi. Three circular projections translate human activity into luminous data landscapes. By tracking individuals with radically different lifestyles, the work illustrates how time is unevenly experienced, shaped by environment, labour and biological response.

Meanwhile, SunDial:NightWatch_Activity and Light by Susan Morris transforms three years of the artist’s sleep and light exposure into a monumental textile. Subtle tonal shifts reveal seasonal changes, disruptions and daily cycles, turning personal data into a meditative visual language.

Dreaming together: art beyond conscious perception

Curated in collaboration with EPFL Pavilions, Lighten Up! On Biology and Time ultimately positions the museum as both laboratory and sensory environment. Across installations, data visualisations, and immersive experiences, the exhibition reframes time as something felt rather than measured.

This multi-sensory art exhibition is one of the most thought-provoking events at the MIT Museum, offering a rare convergence of art and biology and inviting visitors to slow down, listen to their internal rhythms, and experience time as a living, breathing phenomenon.