Art Night will celebrate its fifth edition by taking place in locations across the United Kingdom for the first time this summer and will be coming to the West Midlands.
Transforming iconic and unexpected public spaces within London since 2016, Art Night 2021, curated by Helen Nisbet, will stretch 1000+ miles across Scotland, England and Wales, from North to South and East to West as well as even further digitally and physically for international audiences.
For the first time Art Night – will also take place for a month, allowing audiences the opportunity to access commissions, performances and interventions in rural locales, towns and cities as well as from home.
Guerrilla Girls biggest UK public commission to date, The Male Graze will be part of Art Night 2021. The commission includes a website, online gig and national series of billboards – including Warwick, in partnership with Compton Verney.
The billboard can be found at The Anchor Inn, Digbeth – Rea Street, B5 6ET and at Compton Verney, Warwick
The Guerrilla Girls (est.1985) in New York live and work in LA and New York. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. Recent projects include Kochi Biennial, India (2019); Beyond the Streets – New York and LA (2018); Museu de Arte Sao Paolo (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017) and Tate Modern, London (2016).
The work will also manifest as a series of billboards across the UK with other boards on display in London, Eastbourne, Dundee, Swansea, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, and in Birmingham at The Anchor. The billboards will be on display from 18 June to 18 July.
Kim McAleese, Programme Director of Grand Union comments “We are honoured to be collaborating with Art Night, especially here in the Midlands alongside Compton Verney. I have been attending the festival in London for the past few years, so it is especially resonant to be a part of it and with the Guerrilla Girls! Helen and the team have done such an incredible job of reading the mood of the nation; of artists; and working with care and love to be so ambitious and thoughtful with how the public can engage with art and artists.”
Further amplifying Art Night’s reach for long term London fans of the festival and those further afield, a series of performances and works will be broadcast during the festival dates.
Meanwhile, Isabel Lewis has developed a major new Art Night commission – What can we learn about love from lichen? – taking place in the Scottish Isle of Skye. A co-commission between Art Night and ATLAS Arts, Lewis is working with collaborators in Skye to choreograph a series of guided walks brought together in a final ‘hosted occasion’, tuning the ears, eyes and the body to more sensuous forms of knowing and being together. 16-20 June.
In partnership with Compton Verney in Warwickshire, Isabel Lewis will draw on these choreographic scores to stage a new sound work with guided tuning exercises and this will run for the duration of Art Night. Supported by Goethe-Institut. From 18 June, accessed by booking in advance via the Compton Verney website.
Across London during the festival collaborative art publishing practice OOMK (One of My Kind) will create an artwork which will be distributed across the city. The work consists of the design and distribution of “STUART Papers” a highly visual newspaper that reflects thematically on selected texts and archived ephemera from the Stuart Hall Library at INIVA and connects to contemporary collectives though responsive content. The project will be active across multiple locations in London, including on the Northbank.
At Platfform 2, a new project space at Abergavenny train station in Wales, there will be a screening programme of works by Alberta Whittle in partnership with Peak. A parallel screening programme will also take place concurrently at KLA ART produced by 32° East in Uganda on 15 July and at CCA Derry~Londonderry, from 6-17 July.
The series of commissions that unfold across the month online at https://artnight.london will take place as follows below, including a marathon broadcast of all online film works created in a broadcast partnership with Somerset House across the evening of 15 July. The London
commissions are anchored on the Northbank of the capital but will be available to a global audience. All other broadcasts will be available for 48 hours after the broadcast date on Art Night’s website, launching every Tuesday and Friday during the festival period at 8pm BST.
Alberta Whittle will make a major new commission expanding on Holding the Line, her short film shown as part of Art Night’s Trailers programme. The work will look at colonial histories and police brutality to consider our relationship to current ecological and political climates. Alongside her new film for Art Night, Whittle will also present a new performance at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, in partnership with the New Hall Art Collection on the 8 July. Incorporating sound and movement this outdoor performance will focus on ideas of rebellion, love and oceans. To be broadcast 18 June.
With support from Broadway’s Near Now and Wysing Arts Centre Adham Faramawy will present a new commission for Art Night: The heart wants what the heart wants. The film continues their research into identity, bodies, desire and queering ideas of the natural. This work will explore our entanglement with each other and the multispecies ecology we live within. To be broadcast on 25 June.
Working with bioacoustics, biological time and electromagnetism, Philomène Pirecki will broadcast a new video exploring the ephemerality of intense sensory states, recorded at the newly launched 180 Studios at 180 The Strand and offsite locations. To be broadcast 29 June on Art Night and Somerset House channels.
Award-winning dancer and choreographer Oona Doherty is working with filmmaker Luca Truffarelli, dancer Ryan O’Neill and 2021 hunter Sati Veysseres to produce a new film work – Hunter Filmed – in Belfast, her home city. The film moves between city streets and family homes, interlaced with poetry written by Doherty and O’Neill. To be broadcast 2 July on Art Night and 180 Strand channels.
Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey will present a new work where looped YouTube footage of a young man jumping through the glass window of a bus stop is augmented by an acrobat re-enacting the same action as they are flashed by a brilliant light. Recorded at 180 Studios at 180 The Strand. To be broadcast 9 July on Art Night and 180 Strand channels.
Sonya Dyer will present a new moving image work which extends Hailing Frequencies Open, her ongoing body of work exploring Greek mythology, Speculative fiction and Space travel. HeLa cells, having travelled to the Andromeda galaxy (2.5 million light years from Earth), make contact with our planet via morse code refracted through the rhythms of African diasporic drumming practices. For Art Night, Dyer reimagines the story of Andromeda – the Aethiopian princess of Greek myth – across time and Space. To be broadcast 13 July on Art Night and Somerset House channels.
Imran Perretta and Paul Purgas will present a new work featuring a pre-recorded performance accompanied by Carnatic dance and vocal improvisation to explore diasporic echoes, syncretic mythologies and polyrhythm within South Asian consciousness. To be broadcast on 14 July on Somerset House channels and on 16 July on Art Night channels.
Rather than a ‘theme’, the 2021 festival is titled Nothing Compares 2 U after the song written by Prince and famously performed by Sinead O’ Connor. This lyric acts as a frame for the programme, not asking artists to respond or fit within it, but instead to use it as a reference point or way of setting the tone. In this case, the reference refers most specifically to a performance by O’ Connor on The Late Late Show in 2019 – visibly older than in her iconic 1990 music video, wearing a hijab and carrying the scars of a career tarnished with controversy and conjecture, at the end of the performance O’ Connor looks directly into the camera at and gives a little wave. This quiet moment of self determination and defiance is the essence of the 2021 programme.
Helen Nisbet, Artistic Director of Art Night 2021, said: “We find ourselves hobbling, a year after COVID-19; political and economic uncertainty and potential devastation for the arts. This programme was developed during ongoing Brexit ‘negotiations’ in a Conservative-led Britain, with far right politics rising across the globe. The Art Night 2021 programme was and is still about our personal victories and survival tactics – small acts of defiance and moments of self determination – both personal and collective. It is about how we continue and what gets us through, when so many of the dominant economic, institutional, political and cultural structures are against us or are trying to break us.
We are indebted to our artists for the time and the care they’ve put into making work under such uncertain and challenging circumstances. The constant change has been tough, but it has also offered a beautiful opportunity to adapt the format of the festival – to work across the whole country, to invite camaraderie through partnerships and to expand the duration of the festival. We’ve had to do some quick learning and shifting on considering what it means to curate and produce work to be viewed online but I’m excited about the scope of the commissions to be seen by anyone in the world with internet access”
Philippine Nguyen and Ksenia Zemtsova, Co-founders of Art Night, said: “In 2015, we had the ambition to create London’s first free night-time contemporary art festival in unexpected places. We were only just starting, working from home and learning as we went along. We knew we wanted contemporary art to be accessible to a wider audience, regardless of background. Fast forward 5 years, 4 editions, 260,000 live audiences and 50 major artist commissions, we’re back working from home but our ambition to widen audiences for contemporary continues to expand. In 2021, we’re absolutely delighted to present new work by exceptional artists to audiences across the country, in cities, towns and even villages”