Five questions with... Art Night

1. Can you tell us about Art Night and how National Lottery Project Grants has helped support the project this year?  

Philippine Nguyen (PN): Art Night is an arts organisation best known for the large-scale contemporary art festival we’ve been running every year since 2016. We also work on projects and commission artists outside the main festival time.  

In just four editions (2016-2019), Art Night has attracted 260,000 visitors, and over 2 million more through touring, museum acquisitions and longer display. Over that time, 50 UK-based and international artists have presented major new commissions, and 150 local artists showed work as part of Art Night Open. We’ve also welcomed 10,000 participants actively taking part in Art Night projects; these include estate residents, community projects, amateur dancers, choirs and young people from 30 different schools. 

We received a National Lottery Project Grant to help us deliver our 5th edition, initially planned in 2020 but now happening 18 June to 18 July 2021. For the first time, the festival is extending its run-time to a full month and will take place throughout the UK!

2. Sounds ambitious! Can you tell us more about the thinking behind this expansion?

PN: We’ve wanted to work in different parts of the country for a long time. Though the pandemic has had a huge negative impact on our work and finances, it has given us the time to rethink the format of our 5th edition. Having tens of thousands of people attending an Art Night event across a night or a weekend wasn’t possible, so it seemed important to extend the run time. This has also given time to develop national partnerships further. 

Helen Nisbet (HN): My ambition from when I began as Artistic Director was to work collaboratively with other organisations and to take Art Night outside of London. This began with a project I developed with ATLAS in Skye in 2019, which is being realised this year, as Isabel Lewis’ incredible co-commission What can we learn about love from lichen? The commission has taken place in Skye, online and at Compton Verney. As Philippine noted, the pandemic meant re-thinking a lot but has also allowed us the chance to build partnerships nationally - so we’re also in Abergavenny, Swansea, Cardiff, Dundee, Glasgow, Leeds, Birmingham and Eastbourne this year. We’ll be continuing to work across the country with future editions of the festival and in even more embedded ways.

3. With a new blended programme of online, in-person activity and publicly-placed projects, how did you go about engaging with artists and the public? 

HN: The conversation with the 10 artists in this year’s programme began in 2019 / early 2020. None of us imagined what the world would look like now. We’ve had to work very hard to communicate the multiple changes; to refocus the programme; reconfigure venues; figure out how to produce work that will be shown online rather than in physical space; and keeping morale up for artists when venues change, parameters shift, and we all learn a whole new way of working. I think it has been similar for the public. We’re learning, we’re trying to be clear and honest with our communications and the way work is presented.  

PN: It’s a big learning curve, and it’s a different way of engaging with audiences. We’re lucky that we have a good following so we’re able to draw audiences to see the online work, but this will never replace more spontaneous encounters, when passers-by who would not have attended an art festival stumble upon an Art Night commission in public spaces. Social media does help a lot though! 

4. The festival puts artists and their ideas at the forefront of the programme. Can you tell us more about how you both discover artists and how they inspire the programme?   

HN: As a curator, it is my job to see exhibitions, festivals, read widely, do studio visits, visit degree shows and so on. This has been more difficult over the past 16 months, which makes me really sad - thinking of all the conversations, encounters, camaraderie that has been lost due to working at home and losing our usual ways of being together / connecting.  

Artists are absolutely everything to the programme. Without them and their ideas, there is no festival. This is why making sure we get it right is so vital - is the artist at the right stage? Does their practice sit within the context of the festival? Can we support them to do what they would want to do? Will they work with us to develop and deliver the commission? Are they interested in the location we’re working within?

5. Tell us about some of the highlights of this year’s programme and / or its most memorable moments to date?  

HN: The whole programme is cracking. The artists are amazing. Some key moments for me so far include kicking off with Isabel Lewis’ project in Skye - the project we’d been working on for over two years, so it was emotional to see it happen. Her work is really gorgeous, incredibly moving - and the extended work at Compton Verney and online also hold this power. 

It has also been excellent to have such a strong and expansive work from the Guerrilla Girls across the whole country - they’ve been such a pleasure and inspiration to work with (this sounds like a cliche, but I absolutely mean it). And I’ve loved the online programme. I’m incredibly impressed by the work the artists have made for broadcast, especially given that this wasn’t how any of them initially imagined they’d be working. Oona Doherty’s film has just finished its run on the site and honestly, it’s sublime. (Don’t worry you can still see it as part of the Art Night Marathon on 15 July, 8pm BST).