Park Nights 2023
Each year, Park Nights presents a series of new performance commissions in Serpentine’s annual architectural commission, the Serpentine Pavilion. Serpentine Pavilion 2023: À table – designed by Lebanese-born, Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh – becomes the stage for a series of interdisciplinary artistic engagements on selected evenings this summer.
Since 2002, Park Nights has presented new works across art, music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion, and technology. Each year’s commissions respond to the Pavilion and offer audiences unique ways to experience architecture and performance. The programme has supported many artists in the early stages of their careers, as well as pioneering writers and thinkers from around the world.
This Park Nights season begins with a performance from The Living and The Dead Ensemble, a group of artists, performers, and poets from Haiti, France and the United Kingdom. The ensemble will be presenting a rendition of their performance installation The Wake. The piece reweaves a fragmented geography and asks if there is a possible future beyond the repetition of all kinds of catastrophes.
In September, Brazilian-born visual artist, writer and psychologist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro presents a new performance and installation which explores ritual, dance and celebration in both Afro-Brazilian and Western cultures. Bringing together collaborators from different backgrounds, Vitorino Brasileiro will explore dance as a connective and healing practice that allows us to consider the relationships between interspecific spirituality and different forms of life.
The programme continues through September with a performance from internationally acclaimed DJ and musician Bambii celebrating Black diasporic dance music. In October, Park Nights hosts an experimental performance by Christelle Oyiri, an artist and filmmaker of Ivorian, Guadeloupean and Martinican origin, born in the Paris region, where she lives and works. Traversing musical genres including punk and soca, Oyiri will perform a live iteration of her upcoming record with invited collaborators and musical guests.
FULL PROGRAMME
- Friday, 25th August, 8pm - The Living and The Dead Ensemble
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As part of Park Nights 2023, Serpentine is pleased to present an evening of poetry and performance with The Living and The Dead Ensemble.
The Living and The Dead Ensemble are a group of artists, performers and poets from Haiti, France and the United Kingdom. They initially came together in Haiti in 2017 to produce the Haitian Creole translation and performance of the play Monsieur Toussaint by Édouard Glissant. Initiated by Louis Henderson and Olivier Marboeuf, who have been collaborating as a director/producer partnership since 2014, the Ensemble’s first film OUVERTURES premiered at Berlinale 2020. The Ensemble’s work explores different possible methods of telling the history and the present from a Caribbean perspective. The Ensemble produces texts, performances, films, and installations.
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- Friday, 15th September, 8pm - Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro
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As part of Park Nights 2023, Serpentine is pleased to present a new installation and performance by Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro.
In her multidisciplinary practice, Vitorino Brasileiro studies transmutation, the mystery between life and death, and ways of moving between these existential zones. Her work emerges from healing in existential and bodily senses, and the reclaiming of the body and the spaces in which it circulates. Her pieces bridge performance, installation and pictorial practices, and incorporate elements from the fields of healing, macumba (a group of African diasporic religions in South America) and other psychic-spiritual activities.
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro is the author of the 2022 book Quando o sol aqui não mais brilhar: a falência da negritude (When the Sun No Longer Shines Here: The Collapse of Blackness), and she has participated in solo and group exhibitions across Brazil and internationally. Her most recent solo exhibition Remember When We Talked About Our Reunion took place at Mendes Woods DM, New York. Vitorino Brasileiro is one of the artists to participate in the 2023 Bienal de São Paulo.
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- Friday 29th September, 8pm - Bambii
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As part of Park Nights 2023, Serpentine is pleased to present an evening of music with internationally acclaimed DJ Bambii.
Bambii is a Toronto-based DJ and producer known for her genre-spanning sets which embrace the spirit of dance and rave culture and open up new paths for the free exploration of music.
Whether online or on dancefloors, her music celebrates Black diasporic dance music’s ever-expanding reach, and the relationships it forges between individuals, cultures and spaces. She has spent the last few years touring the world as a solo artist as well as joining forces with well-known musicians, including Mykki Blanco, Kelela and BbyMutha. Her newest EP Infinity Club, released on 4 August 2023, features contributions from artists Lady Lykez, Aluna, Sydanie, Lamsi and Ragz Originale.
- Friday, 6th October, 8pm - Christelle Oyiri
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As part of Park Nights 2023, Serpentine is pleased to present an evening of music and performance with Christelle Oyiri.
Christelle Oyiri is an artist and filmmaker. She is also known as DJ and electronic music producer CRYSTALLMESS, and has performed around the world under this moniker. Over the past years, her work has appeared at Gladstone Gallery New York, Lafayette Anticipations, Haus der Kunst, and Tramway Glasgow amongst other venues. Oyiri engages with issues related to the collective memory of both forgotten and well-known mythologies, be they ancient or ultra-modern. She lives and works in Paris.
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