Filled with Fire Sculptures and Candlelit Installations, After-Dark Experience 'Afterglow' Is Making Its World Premiere in Brisbane
Brisbane Festival 2025 is set to light up the City Botanic Gardens with this fiery event, which will also feature live performances.
When an arts festival gifts its chosen city with shows, it also brightens up the darkness whenever its program spills into venues and spaces around town after night falls. Many such fests like taking that idea literally. At Brisbane Festival, for example, after-dark light event Lightscape was on the lineup in 2023 and 2024, getting the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens glowing. The same fest is heading to the same place in 2025, but with something different: the fiery Afterglow.
Brisbane is hosting the world-premiere run of this luminous experience, which is part of the 2025 Brisbane Festival program. Across Friday, September 5–Saturday, September 27, Afterglow will fill one of the River City CBD's leafiest parts with fire sculptures and candlelit installations, and also live performances. If you want to be among the first on the planet to enjoy it, you'll need to be in the Queensland capital.
At Afterglow, you'll wander. You'll follow the flame-lined 1.4-kilometre path through an inner-city patch of greenery. You'll soak in the work of fire artists, too, and you'll watch the evening blaze away in the process.
"Across time and cultures, people have always felt a connection to fire — as an element of nature, a force of renewal, or a symbol of ceremony and ritual," said Brisbane Festival Artistic Director Louise Bezzina, announcing Afterglow as part of 2025's lineup.
"Afterglow is a slow-burn experience, an invitation to deliberately and respectfully engage with the artistry and power of fire."
Markus Ravik
If this sounds familiar, that might be because you're thinking of Fire Gardens, another installation event with flames at its centre. It was last in Australia in 2024 for Illuminate Adelaide — and back in 2019, it was meant to also be part of the Brisbane Festival program.
A hit everywhere from Stonehenge to the Pont du Gard before it began making stops Down Under, Fire Gardens hails from French art collective Compagnie Carabosse, a group that has been starting fires professionally for more than two decades. Its planned Brisbane trip six years ago didn't eventuate, however, due to devastating bushfires carving a destructive path across the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast at the time, plus a total fire ban that was put in place across southeast Queensland as a result.
Afterglow is completely separate to Fire Gardens, though — and will run every 15 minutes each evening across its dates from 5.45pm. The trail is family friendly, and also accessible.
The event falls within the jam-packed 2025 Brisbane Festival program, which also includes a Gatsby-themed show and pop-up club, turning some of the city's pedestrian bridges into an art trail, a tribute to beloved restaurant Sultan's Kitchen, and a world-premiere dance work by acclaimed choreographer Benjamin Millepied and LA Dance Project, to name just a few of its 106 productions and 1069 performances.
Andrew Ogilvy
Afterglow will take over the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens, Alice Street, Brisbane between Friday, September 5–Saturday, September 27, 2025 during Brisbane Festival. For more information and tickets, head to the fest's website.
Brisbane Festival 2025 runs from Friday, September 5–Saturday, September 27 at various venues around Brisbane. Head to the fest's website for tickets and further details.
Top image: Mellumae and Sean Dowling. All images: Sony Music Entertainment.
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