Park Nights, the Serpentine’s annual series of experimental and interdisciplinary encounters, returned in 2018 to present eight international artists each responding to the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion designed by the award-winning architect Frida Escobedo.
Since 2002, Park Nights has commissioned practitioners in the fields of art, music, film, theatre, dance, literature and philosophy to create site-specific work in the summer Pavilion, offering unique ways of experiencing architecture and performance.
PARK NIGHTS 2018 PROGRAMME
Friday 13 July, 8pm
Dorothy Iannone presented 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 accompanied them with stories of unconditional loves and lovers who sacrificed their own happiness or even their own lives for the sake of their beloved.
Friday 20 July, 9pm
Meriem Bennani, with musician and composer Flavien Berger, devised a live virtual dance battle, integrating motion-capture technology, 3D animation and a digital avatar entitled Avatar Idol. This freestyle dance-off traced the artist’s interlaced focus on the vernacular and traditional representation of North-African culture and globalised popular culture.
Friday 27 July, 8pm
Drawing from seminal works of social science fiction and reflective, speculative encounters of looking and wanting, Victoria Sin presented a character’s journey through fictional locations, exploring transformational narratives in the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Friday 3 August, 8pm
Following the release of his anticipated second album, Heaven and Earth, celebrated saxophonist, composer and producer Kamasi Washington and his band came together for a dynamic, improvisational performance that opened the door to a music experience unlike anything heard before.
Friday 10 August, 8pm
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 worked with South African band FAKA on an all vocal performance featuring a choir and a preview of their SS19 collection.
Friday 7 September, 8pm
Yaeji performed an original work exploring the connectivity of her musical influences with UK dance and electronic music through deconstructed and recontextualised compositions. The audience were blindfolded and accompanied by an immersive sound system.
Friday 14 September, 8pm
Megan Rooney used 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 21 September, 8pm
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.
