ART CITIES:London-Art Night 2017
Art Night is a free contemporary arts festival that puts art into elocations around London for one night a year, encouraging the public to experience art and their city through entirely fresh eyes. Each year the festival partners with a leading cultural institution and curator, focusing on a different area of London to explore its distinctive identity, culture and architecture through various forms of art.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art Night 2017 Archive
Art Night 2017 takes place in East London, transforming it with art, performance and music by some of the world’s most exciting artists at work today. A collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, the festival is supported by international auction house Phillips, and receives public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Art Night 2017 presents 13 projects by 11 artists in 13 venues. All events are free and open to all, except the Club Night at Village Underground. The event at the Bascule Chamber of Tower Bridge is by pre-registration only, due to the nature of the space. Breese Little host a late-night viewing of “31 Women”. The exhibition channels the pioneering spirit of the exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery in 1943. Featuring the work of artists within Guggenheim’s circle, the exhibition combines work by the successive generations of practitioners from the 1940s to the present day. The exhibition further presents a group of artists with a strong presence in London, offering an engaging survey of important figures working or exhibiting in the city today, including artists Tracey Emin, Helen Chadwick and Rachel Whiteread. “All Mysteries, Explained” is a new performance by artist Holly Slingsby, taking the form of a miracle play in three acts. The artwork treats the continuous transformation of east London as an allegory for spiritual transcendence and fecundity. The exhibition “Dis/Obedient Women” at Kobi Nazrul Centre is inspired by the vibrant and colourful garments common in East End shopfronts. Through often humorous and poignant artworks that relate to items of clothing, this exhibition addresses social and cultural traditions and invites a questioning of larger issues: belonging, dislocation, personal identity, stereotypes, gender, hypocrisy and power structures, including the many constructs around the female body. In addition, the Associate Programme presents a huge selection of screenings, exhibitions, performances, installations, music concerts and more from London-based organisations, curators and galleries which are taking place alongside the curated trail.
Info: Curator: Fatoş Üstek, London, Duration: 1/7/17, Hours: 18:00-4:00, www.artnight.london
