COS x Serpentine Galleries Park Nights 2019

Serpentine Galleries announces the programme for this year’s Park Nights, its annual series of experimental, interdisciplinary commissions in the Serpentine Pavilion, designed by architect Junya Ishigami. On select Fridays, COS x Serpentine Galleries Park Nights 2019 presents new commissions by international practitioners in the fields of art, music, poetry, theatre, augmented reality and fashion. Each site-specific work responds to Ishigami’s contemplative design, which takes inspiration from roofs and creates an enclosed cave-like place that provides an imaginative space for live encounters.

Park Nights begin on July 5 with poet and artist Precious Okoyomon presenting a new play The End of the World, a spectral-performance that asks the viewer to consider the visceral experience of anti-blackness as an errant and pathological virus and the double articulation of lightness and darkness, haunted inexorably by their racialisation. Jakob Kudsk Steensen creates a sonic and immersive environment for The Deep Listener, the inaugural Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission that explores themes of extinction, preservation and the emergence of new ecological realities. Shawanda Corbett presents Blackbird in Mississippi, a performance in which the protagonist, haar wese, time travels to Mississippi where music offers her a voice in her quest to find placement in displacement. Menswear designer Kiko Kostadinov presents an evening in collaboration with vanillajellaba, a London anonymous collective developed around the translation of everyday consumerism and ordinary occurrences through a distorted lens. Composer and playwright Klein writes original music for a multisensory performance, using collagist techniques to assemble recordings of her own vocals and instrumentation into unique soundscapes. Enigmatic singer-songwriter 1010 Benja SL performs KINDLIG a site-specific performance for the Serpentine Pavilion. Pioneering artist Cecilia Vicuña presents Clit Nest, a participatory and poetic performance that reimagines the Serpentine Pavilion’s roof as a connector to the cosmos and its cave-like interior as a womb.

COS x Serpentine Park Nights 2019 is curated by Claude Adjil, Curator at Large and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director with Kostas Stasinopoulos, Assistant Curator and Holly Shuttleworth, Producer, Live Programmes.

Ticket information at www.serpentinegalleries.org/explore/park-nights

Friday, July 5
For her new play The End of the World, with an original score by Yves B. Golden, Precious Okoyomon rescues her characters from classical antiquity and Christianity, where the angels of light, death and the sun have fallen to earth and a reckoning is coming.

Friday, July 12
Focusing on deep listening, artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen devises an evening of sound, poetry and spoken word that extends our senses, our awareness of the earth and the environments around us by slowing down, listening, paying attention and using our ears.

Friday, July 26
Shawanda Corbett presents Blackbird in Mississippi, a performance from the perspective of a black woman with a disability, in which the artist draws parallels between a slave’s voyage on the underground railroad to the artist’s own journey for rehabilitation.

Friday, August 16
Kiko Kostadinov in collaboration with vanillajellaba devise an evening that showcases the collective’s anonymous character, marking the first appearance of vanillajellaba outside the comfort of their semi-realistic domestic environment. 

Friday, September 6
Klein presents Lifetime, a multisensory performance exploring the fragility of one’s culture through memory and loss using this performance as tool of preservation. Featuring original music written and performed by Klein and wearable technology devised by Carolin Schnurrer.

Friday, September 20
Artist and musician 1010 Benja SL performs KINDLIG, a project with a mysterious musical composition, presented in collaboration with Young Turks.

Friday, September 27
For Clit Nest, a new participatory poetic performance, pioneering artist Cecilia Vicuña weaves a temporary nest for the clitoris of the earth, to birth collectively a culture of solidarity with the earth and each other.
Clit Nest by Cecilia Vicuña is supported by Catherine Petitgas.