Art festival to mark ‘personal victories and survival tactics’ as it goes national

A CONTEMPORARY art festival is expanding from London to take place across the country, from the Isle of Skye to Leeds this summer.

Art Night 2021 will take place in more than 10 locations around the United Kingdom including Abergavenny train station, Eastbourne,

Leeds and Cambridge, while a series of commissions will unfold online.

For the first time the festival, this year titled Nothing Compares 2U , will take place for a month, running from June 18 to July 18.

It will include a series of billboards across the country by

Guerrilla Girls, their biggest UK public commission to date, titled The Male Graze which is their response to what art historians call ‘the male gaze’ and will explore sexism past and present.

It will appear in London, Eastbourne, Dundee, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Cardiff, Warwick,

Swansea and more. Others featuring in the festival include Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey and Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle.

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.”

Art Night is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.