The 12-day festival, now in its 13th year, showcases the history, heritage and architecture of the eponymous emirate with a mesmerising carnival of lights, colours and music. The largest festival of its kind in the region, it invites internationally renowned artists to celebrate the city’s built and natural environment, using large-scale projection mapping to illuminate and reimagine landmarks such as the Sharjah Mosque, the city’s largest house of worship, and the spectacular Hajjar Mountains, which overlook the Al Rafisah Dam.

For the 2024 festival, Dubai-based videomapping specialist and immersion content creator enlisted its extensive Digital Projection to create the truly unique visual experiences, successfully attracting over 500,000 visitors to participate in this annual event.
2024 Sharjah Light Festival

The Jewel of Rafisha Dam
A tourist destination in its own right, the Al Rafisah Dam is located in a picturesque spot surrounded by greenery and sandstone mountains around an hour’s drive out of Sharjah city. During Sharjah Light Festival it was the venue for The Jewel of Al Rafisah Dam, a 3D projection mapping show inspired by the ‘Golden Age of Sharjah’, focusing on the ancient history of the city of Khorfakkan and the United Arab Emirates’ native flora and fauna.

The Jewel of Al Rafisah Dam marked the first time visual content had been mapped onto a mountain of that size – a feat which involved several challenges, as Mounir Harbaoui, founder and managing director of Artabesk, explains: “We had two main challenges for this projection: the brightness, as the mountain is a brownish, stone colour, and the multiple shadows the mountain creates, as it is not a flat surface.”
3D projection mapping show - The Jewel of Rafisha Dam(300m × 50m)

Sharjah Mosque
Unlike the Al Rafisah Dam mountain projection, which featured moving visuals and music, for Sharjah Mosque was limited to still images, given the sensitivities associated with projecting onto a religious site. Despite this, the powerful, ultra-bright imagery generated by the TITAN Laser projectors ensured that the strikingly illuminated mosque was widely regarded one of the highlights of the festival.

Also among the four festival sites entrusted to Artabesk, which used a mix of TITAN Laser 37000 WU and M-Vision 23000 WU projectors, was the Sharjah Mosque, located on a 190,000m² (2m sqft) site in Sharjah city. There, we employed 21 TITAN Laser 37000 WU to create a 400m² linear projection, divided into eight areas across the entire surface of the mammoth mosque, whose minarets alone are almost 40m high.
One of the highlights of the festival - Sharjah Mosque