BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival
Streamliner Productions x Tātaki Auckland Unlimited - BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival, October 2025
The Festival
Diwali — known also as Deepawali — is the festival of light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. In Auckland, it has become one of Aotearoa's largest cultural festivals, drawing tens of thousands of people into the city centre each year to share in a celebration that belongs to the whole community.
The BNZ Auckland Diwali Festival is an Auckland Council event delivered by Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, the region's cultural, events and destination agency. The 2025 festival brought the celebration across Aotea Square, Queen Street, and Rutland Street over the weekend of 11 and 12 October, with a wider programme of ticketed and free events running from 7 October. Streamliner Productions was engaged to deliver the projection mapping on Auckland Town Hall — an activation that ran each evening from 4 to 12 October, turning one of the city's most recognisable heritage buildings into a canvas for stories of light and celebration.
The Building
Auckland Town Hall sits opposite Aotea Square on Queen Street, its Edwardian heritage facade familiar to anyone who has spent time in the city centre. It is not a neutral surface. It carries history and civic weight, and anything projected onto it becomes part of how the city presents itself. That responsibility shaped every decision in the production.
The Production
Streamliner deployed multiple 30,000 lumen projectors to map the full exterior of the Town Hall, delivering a level of brightness and clarity that could hold its own against the ambient light of one of Auckland's busiest streetscapes. At 30,000 lumens per unit, its is the kind of power required when the canvas is large, the street is lit, and the content needs to read with vibrancy and precision rather than washing out against the surroundings.
The content was created by Auckland creative studio Creature Post, whose work brought the spirit of Diwali to life across the building's facade — vivid, story-led, and designed to connect with the breadth of the audience gathering on the street below. Running across nine consecutive evenings, the projection was part of the city's public Diwali experience, free to anyone who happened to walk past and free to everyone who came specifically to see it.
What It Achieved
Tātaki Auckland Unlimited Chief Executive Nick Hill described the festival as one that "strengthens community connections, recognises the contribution our diverse population makes to Auckland, supports local businesses and contributes to the vibrancy of our city centre." The Town Hall projection was a central part of that story — a piece of public art that extended the festival's reach beyond its stages and food stalls and into the fabric of the city itself.
Projection mapping at this scale and duration on a heritage building in a live public environment demands technical precision, reliable equipment, and a team that understands how to deliver night after night without incident. For nine evenings, one of Auckland's most loved buildings told a story that tens of thousands of people stopped to watch.
