Art Night comes to Wales for the first time!

ART NIGHT COMES TO WALES FOR THE FIRST TIME AND MAJOR NEW COMMISSIONS TO PREMIERE IN CARDIFF, SWANSEA AND ABERGAVENNY Art Night expands into month long festival taking place from 18 June to 18 July 2021 and comes to Wales. For the first time, the festival is moving out of London, taking place in over 10 locations around the United Kingdom, including Cardiff, Swansea and Abergavenny Transforming iconic and unexpected public spaces within London since 2016, Art Night 2021, curated by Helen Nisbet, will stretch 1000+ miles across Scotland, England and Wales, from North to South and East to West as well as even further digitally and physically for international audiences. For the first time Art Night - will also take place for a month, allowing audiences the opportunity to access commissions, performances and interventions in rural locales, towns and cities as well as from home. Art Night will celebrate its fifth edition by taking place in locations across the United Kingdom and for the first time this summer - 18 June to 18 July 2021 - is coming to Wales. Guerrilla Girls biggest UK public commission to date, The Male Graze will be part of Art Night 2021. The commission includes a website, online gig and national series of billboards - including in Swansea and Cardiff, in partnership with Swansea’s Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and g39. The Guerrilla Girls (est.1985 in New York) live and work in LA and New York. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. Recent projects include Kochi Biennial, India (2019); Beyond the Streets – New York and LA (2018); Museu de Arte Sao Paolo (2018); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017) and Tate Modern, London (2016). This major outdoor work will also manifest as a series of billboards across the UK including, Swansea, Cardiff, Eastbourne, Dundee, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Warwick, as well as others. The billboards will be on display from 18 June to 18 July. A programme of film works by Alberta Whittle will be hosted by Peak, an arts organisation based in the Welsh Black Mountains, at Platfform 2, their new project space at Abergavenny railway station. The opening weekend will feature Alberta Whittle’s new film commission for Art Night 2021, followed by other recent works over successive weekends of the festival month. Commissioned responses from Wales-based artists, writers and poets will be celebrated through a publication and online event and Young People living and working along the trainline will invigilate the screening space, launching Peak’s new partnership with Transport for Wales at Platfform 2 as a resource for young people, artists and rural communities. Peak’s website will host Art Night’s Marathon on 15th July 2021. Parallel screening programmes are taking place at KLA ART produced by 32° East in Uganda on 15 July and at CCA Derry~Londonderry, from 6-17 July. “This year, with Art Night connecting so many new sites and new venues it is so good to be working with the Art Night team, but also working within a community that reaches out from Wales and Scotland and England. Playing a small part in this conversation, amplifying Guerrilla Girls, The Male Graze is such an exciting way to come back together.” g39 team. "We are delighted to be a part of Art Night 2021, to bring Guerrilla Girls’ new work to the streets of Swansea. We’re excited to be a part of this national festival, to realise our cities as places of creativity and conversation, through inspiring and thought provoking artist’s work." Karen MacKinnon, Swansea Council’s Curator of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery. “We’re excited to collaborate with Art Night and Transport for Wales to present film works by Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle at Platfform 2, new project spaces at Abergavenny Railway Station in the Welsh Borders. As we emerge from lockdown, this inaugural summer programme launches both a new arts venue and partnerships to help us reimagine the possibilities for our local and global futures.” Melissa Appleton, Creative Director, Peak Further amplifying Art Night’s reach for long term London fans of the festival and those further afield, a series of performances and works will be broadcast during the festival dates. Rather than a ‘theme’, the 2021 festival is titled Nothing Compares 2 U after the song written by Prince and famously performed by Sinead O’ Connor. This lyric acts as a frame for the programme, not asking artists to respond or fit within it, but instead to use it as a reference point or way of setting the tone. In this case, the reference refers most specifically to a performance by O’ Connor on The Late Late Show in 2019 - visibly older than in her iconic 1990 music video, wearing a hijab and carrying the scars of a career tarnished with controversy and conjecture, at the end of the performance O’ Connor looks directly into the camera at and gives a little wave. This quiet moment of self determination and defiance is the essence of the 2021 programme. Helen Nisbet, Artistic Director of Art Night 2021, said: “We find ourselves hobbling, a year after COVID-19; political and economic uncertainty and potential devastation for the arts. This programme was developed during ongoing Brexit ‘negotiations’ in a Conservative-led Britain, with far right politics rising across the globe. The Art Night 2021 programme was and is still about our personal victories and survival tactics - small acts of defiance and moments of self determination - both personal and collective. It is about how we continue and what gets us through, when so many of the dominant economic, institutional, political and cultural structures are against us or are trying to break us. We are indebted to our artists for the time and the care they’ve put into making work under such uncertain and challenging circumstances. The constant change has been tough, but it has also offered a beautiful opportunity to adapt the format of the festival - to work across the whole country, to invite camaraderie through partnerships and to expand the duration of the festival. We’ve had to do some quick learning and shifting on considering what it means to curate and produce work to be viewed online but I’m excited about the scope of the commissions to be seen by anyone in the world with internet access” Philippine Nguyen and Ksenia Zemtsova, Co-founders of Art Night, said: “In 2015, we had the ambition to create London's first free night-time contemporary art festival in unexpected places. We were only just starting, working from home and learning as we went along. We knew we wanted contemporary art to be accessible to a wider audience, regardless of background. Fast forward 5 years, 4 editions, 260,000 live audiences and 50 major artist commissions, we're back working from home but our ambition to widen audiences for contemporary continues to expand. In 2021, we're absolutely delighted to present new work by exceptional artists to audiences across the country, in cities, towns and even villages” Image: Guerrilla Girls, 2017. Courtesy of the artists. Visit: http://artnight.london Twitter: @ARTNIGHTLDN, Instagram: @ARTNIGHTLDN, Facebook Art Night | Art Night is administrated by ArtCity Nights, a registered charity no 1164449. Art Night would like to thank its 2021 Partners and Supporters: ATLAS Arts, Arts Council England, Art Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Compton Verney, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Diversity Art Forum, FACT, g39, Glynn Vivian Swansea, Grand Union, Goethe-Institut London, Hiscox, Iniva, Jack Arts, KLA ART, Inviva, Mayor of London, Near Now Nottingham, New Hall Art Collection, The Northbank, Peak, Somerset House, 180 Studios and 180 The Strand, The Tetley, Towner Eastbourne.

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