Park Nights 2018

Serpentine Galleries announces the programme for this year’s Park Nights, its annual series of experimental, interdisciplinary commissions in the Serpentine Pavilion, designed by award-winning architect Frida Escobedo. On select summer Fridays, Park Nights 2018 presents eight commissions by international practitioners in the fields of art, music, performance, theatre and fashion. Each site-specific work responds to Escobedo’s design, which draws on Mexican and British elements to create a reflective, imaginative space for live encounters.

Park Nights begins July 13 with pioneering feminist artist Dorothy Iannone presenting an intimate and magnetic performance that traces unconditional love and the sacrifice of happiness. Meriem Bennani creates an arresting environment in which a live motion capture video game provides the ground for a heated dance battle. Using poetry, drag, science fiction and an original soundtrack by Shy One, Victoria Sin presents a ballad of embodiment, longing and transformation. Multi-instrumentalist, composer and producer Kamasi Washington plays an improvisational and site-specific performance. Unisex fashion line TELFAR collaborates with South African band FAKA and a live choir for a preview of their SS19 Collection. Korean-American artist Yaeji performs original work exploring the connections between her musical influences and UK dance and electronic music, inviting her listeners into an immersive self-reflective world. Megan Rooney works with movement, words and sound in a performance about a forbidden place in which neither the self, nor its narratives, are solid. Pedro Reyes stages an ideological-science-fiction-comedy that addresses the risks of AI, automation and the post-truth infosphere. Park Nights culminates with the annual Serpentine Marathon on September 22.

Park Nights 2018 is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director; Claude Adjil, Curator; Lucia Pietroiusti, Curator and Kostas Stasinopoulos, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes.

Ticket information here.

Friday, July 13
Dorothy Iannone presents Movie People Perpetual Performance, an evening based on her ongoing Movie People project, featuring a series of wooden cut-out characters that originated in the 1960s. Assembling all her Movie People together for the first time, Iannone accompanies them with stories of unconditional loves and lovers who sacrifice their own happiness or even their own lives for the sake of their beloved.

Friday, July 20, 9pm
Meriem Bennani, with musician and composer Flavien Berger, devises a live virtual dance battle, integrating motion-capture technology, 3D animation and a digital avatar. This freestyle dance-off traces the artist’s interlaced focus on the vernacular and traditional representation of North-African culture and globalised popular culture.

Friday, July 27
Drawing from seminal works of social science fiction and reflective, speculative encounters of looking and wanting, Victoria Sin ​presents a character’s journey through fictional locations, exploring transformational narratives in the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.

Friday, August 3
Following the release of his anticipated second album, Heaven and Earth, celebrated saxophonist, composer and producer Kamasi Washington and his band come together for a dynamic, improvisational performance that opens the door to a music experience unlike anything heard before.

Friday, August 10
Founded in 2005, unisex fashion line TELFAR was ignored by the mainstream fashion press for a decade due to its non-racial/non-gendered vision of fashion. Since winning the 2017 Vogue/CFDA fashion fund, TELFAR has been developing a mode of presentation based on musical collaborations that emphasise what is collectively owned and essentially human in style and music. TELFAR is working with South African band FAKA on an all vocal performance featuring a choir and a preview of their SS19 collection.

Friday, September 7
Yaeji performs an original work exploring the connectivity of her musical influences with UK dance and electronic music through deconstructed and recontextualised compositions. The audience will be blindfolded and accompanied by an immersive sound system.

Friday, September 14
Megan Rooney uses the Pavilion as a site for storytelling, filling it with movement, words and sound. SUN DOWN MOON UP, a performance about a group of female magpies that invade Mount Athos, explores metaphors of nature, the human subject and the boundaries of a forbidden space.

Friday, September 21
Manufacturing Mischief is a puppet-play by Pedro Reyes in which the protagonist, Noam Chomsky, finds an antagonist in the toxic individualism of Ayn Rand. Other characters include Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, who are blind to the human costs of their techno utopias.