Last Saturday, night-time festival Art Night made its debut in the Scottish city of Dundee – the first time the one-night-only arts event has had a full release outside of London. It was also the first full Art Night event since the pandemic. “The festival has no theme, it’s about being together and coming together after a long time apart,” said Art Night artistic director Helen Nisbet. She added the caveat that “it’s also very much about the city of Dundee, the places, the landscape, the cultural and political history and, above all, the people”.
This web of art, people and places was powerfully encapsulated in Richey Carey’s performance and installation in the large glass-fronted pavilion in Baxter Park, donated to the people rather than the city of Dundee by the linen mill owned by the Baxter family in the mid-19th century. It was both haunting and uplifting to hear Carey’s powerful and sometimes cacophonous soundscape based on the sounds of newsboys and delivered by a number of Dundee-based singers (including the wonderfully named band Loadsaweeminsinging) doing echo through one of the few remaining chunks of truly common voices. land in the city.
Nearby, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley occupied another historic public building with a room-sized interactive art video game called Lack: I knew your voice before you spoke. It was at Arthurstone Community Library, one of five public libraries funded in the early 20th century by Scottish-American steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Hopping on vinyl floor mats, even your gaming-phobic correspondent enjoyed navigating a “mid-apocalyptic world” of “Black Trans TV” in which angels could be collected, weather systems (including “rain anti-supremacy”) changed and the potential for matches between protagonists such as “Married Cis Girl into Trans Porn” and “Desperate Trans Girl Feels Unlovable” to be created (and possibly broken).
Woosh Flower Showorganized by the Wooosh Gallery, run by traveling artists Photo: Tom Nolan
Affectionate and often fantastical unions were also found in Tai Shani’s works. My body remains, your body remains, and all bodily remains that ever were and always will be. This epic film meditated on the emancipatory power of love and was screened at the Little Theatre, home to Dundee’s oldest drama society. There was more mesh of art and community life in the gloriously bonkers Woosh Flower Show, mounted by the Wooosh Gallery, run by traveling artists from Dundee. This performative floral display of wheelbarrow-carried exhibits was first processed from community gardens across the city to a judging ceremony in the Miller’s Wynd parking lot, where all the painstakingly planted wheelbarrows will now remain until their contents are completely consumed by snails and slugs.
Generator Projects, Dundee’s leading artist-run space, also drew crowds with Dundonian artist and recent graduate Euan Taylor, AKA Inefficient Solutions. Taylor’s project The Hi-Visit invited visitors to be photographed in a “hard work environment”, wearing hard hats and fluorescent jackets and accompanied by a kindly dressed CEO against the backdrop of a pile of trash, possibly awaiting recycling .
Art Night also took place in established art spaces in Dundee. Inside Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s two-storey Oak Room, originally designed for a Glasgow tea room in 1907 and now the crown jewel of the V&A Dundee, Lucy McKenzie was joining the dots of international modernism in screening a reissued version of Nahrdelnik (necklace) a 1990s Czech historical television drama, which was largely shot on location in another famous interior: Albert Loos’ 1933 Villa Müller in Prague. At the Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Heather Phillipson’s Dreamland reconfirmed our indelible interconnectedness with everything around us by remixing and reinterpreting classic BBC nature documentaries from the 1980s in a trippily engulfing cross-species mash-up. In this context, Phillipson also staged Mourning rituala live performance in which she used film, sound and spoken word in a poetic and poignant elegy to all dead animals, including her recently deceased dog.
Performance by Saoirse Amira Anis © Erika Stevenson
The McKenzie and Phillipson exhibits will both remain in situ until early July, while Dundee based Saoirse Amira Anis’ film and installation breach of a frayed body is currently on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) until August 6th. One of several Dundee-based artists taking a leading role in Art Night, Anis draws on both her Scottish and Moroccan heritage to create a mysterious, string-laden deity who lives part in and part out of the water. For Art Night, she brought this creature to life as an elaborately masked and somewhat sinister figure – clad in a tattered, beaded crimson cape – that scuttled, swooped and hissed from DCA to HMS Unicorn , a wooden naval frigate moored on the seafront. Here she threw the mask as an offering into the River Tay, site and source of much of Dundee’s wealth, trade and upset stories.
The other famous vessel in the sea town is the Dundee-built RRS Discovery, which took Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton to Antarctica in 1901 and is now a major landmark, standing alongside the spectacular hull-shaped building of the V&A Dundee designed by Kengo Kuma. For Art Night, Discovery’s decks rumbled with a mix of experimental and traditional bagpipes, saxophone and other instrumental music in a program designed and partly performed by musician, broadcaster and DJ Nabihah Iqbal, who, in a last tribute to Scott and his expeditions, ended up doing a DJ set at Dundee’s Arctic Bar.
In inviting artists to participate in Art Night, Nisbet revealed that she drew an analogy to house parties and how different activities take place in different rooms: as she puts it, “dancing in the living room, having a meaningful conversation in the kitchen, meeting an old friend in the bathroom, crying with a pal in the garden, or smooching on the stairs. Undoubtedly, all of the above took place across Dundee last Saturday night, but for this writer, the house party’s dance-action vibe was most abundantly provided by Emma Hart. DEDICATION, a celebration of delirium that took place not in a living room but in the multi-storey car park of Greenmarket. Here on the top floor overlooking the River Tay, Hart and his sister DJ Emma played an epic four-hour set where we all made our moves among his painted cardboard sculptures of giant raised hands and gave thanks for being together so happily. in the name of art.
