WATCH: Auckland Harbour Bridge transforms with fabulous light show for Pride

Auckland’s Harbour Bridge is lighting up for the rest of the week in celebration of Auckland’s Pride festival.

As part of the second year of a three-year partnership between Auckland Pride and Vector Lights, the brand-new light show has taken over the bridge for a total of 27 hours this week.

But while the lights sure are the eye-catching side of it all, the show comes with some important history behind it.

Artist Mars Cook worked alongside Mandylights to craft a light and sound experience that celebrates Takatāpui and Rainbow communities while marking 40 years since Homosexual Law Reform in Aotearoa.

From February 13th-21st, the show will glow on the bridge every 15 minutes from 9pm to midnight, blending sound and storytelling in a beautifully colourful way.

“This project was right up my alley, as I love to learn about and create art about history. I've always been quite existential - often thinking about the origin of life, what exists beyond us,” Cook says of the project.

He crafted the soundtrack to capture the story of the creation of Earth and the development of lifeforms from 4.5 billion years ago to the present day. 

“Queer people are often accused of being 'abnormal', but the accusers are just as abnormal as we are,” he adds.

Earth's ecosystems survive and thrive on bizarre levels of biological diversity. Every living being is a massive statistical improbability, and yet here we are, weird, queer, just as strange to a hermaphroditic frog species as they are to us.

“Pride festivals whakapapa to radical liberationist politics, and I don't want anyone to forget that,” Cooks continues.

“Our freedom was not given to us by charity; it was earned. Our rainbow elders would not let themselves, their friends, whānau and lovers die in vain of AIDS; they fought back.”

“They made nuisances of themselves by protesting and campaigning. That's also how people across Aotearoa's history advocated for freedoms like the weekend and sex work decriminalisation,” he adds.

So if you’re driving over or spotting it from the waterfront this week, just know it’s not just a pretty light show - it’s a beautiful display of the decades of hard-earned pride that it took to get to where we are today.