Art Night: Dundee’s House Party

For its sixth edition, Art Night – a biennial festival that takes place over the course of a single evening – relocated to the Scottish city of Dundee, home to an embedded and vibrant art scene. In the press material, the outgoing artistic director, Helen Nisbet, described this year’s iteration, organized in partnership with Dundee Contemporary Arts, as a ‘house party’. Here, ten new commissions, spread across a number of galleries and public spaces throughout the city, focus on energy, life cycles and co-existence.

In the Victoria & Albert Museum Dundee, a new video by Lucy McKenzie – a graduate of the city’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design – plays on a box monitor in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room (1907), a displaced wooden interior originally produced for Glasgow’s Ingram Street Tearooms. Held tightly by this architecture, Náhrdelník (Necklace, 2023) consists of footage from the eponymous 1992 Czech television series. McKenzie’s edit – featuring new subtitles to create a contemporary narrative – focuses on Adolf Loos’s modernist Villa Müller (1930) in Prague. At one point, seemingly speaking to the overarching theme of Art Night, a character in the film says: ‘You should just do whatever you want. Hardcore’. 

Heather Phillipson’s commission, Dream Land (2023), exhibited at Cooper Gallery, monumentalizes the life cycles of insects using archival documentary footage. In this frank yet sentimental work, we witness communities of bedbugs roaming the sheets beneath couples fucking and flies feeding on foxes at night. For his Baxter Park Pavilion performance {stereo – type – music} (2023), Richy Carey stands on a bench conducting a choir as they weave in and out of the audience. The work examines how the practices of the printing industry – which has a prominent legacy in Dundee – inform how we share and listen. The choir’s chanting, which sees them repeating the word ‘shit’ at one point, seems almost to vibrate the roof. Although performed inside the pavilion, the piece is amplified into the park and beyond through outside speakers.

The night unfolds, as house parties so often do, from modest beginnings to a flamboyant end: the artist-led space Wooosh Gallery holds a flower show in a car park (Wooosh Flower Show, 2023); Emma Hart occupies another car park with colourful cardboard sculptures (BIG UP, 2023); Nabihah Iqbal boards the RRS Discovery with experimental bagpipes and saxophones (Sonic Voyages, 2023); while the worn, peach velvet seats at The Little Theatre provide the perfect setting for Tai Shani’s latest series of filmic tableaux, My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be (2023).

Elsewhere, Dundee Women’s Aid takes over a city centre billboard (Journey to Connection, 2023), which displays a picture of participants from the group surrounded by drawings. In the Keiller Centre, local band The Bad Kisses explode with all things glam rock. As the dense programme unfolds over a single evening, visitors race against the clock to see all the works while bumping into art world colleagues and former lovers or nipping off to grab a kebab.

Around midnight, a friend sends me a video of a group dancing in a greeting card shop to ‘Groovejet’ by Spiller (2000). The dancers’ heads bob and arms flail above the rows of cards dedicated to ‘Dad’ or ‘Grandma’. Meanwhile, I am in an overcapacity pub, unsure if we are still ‘doing art’. But, at the end of this long, charged night, perhaps it is enough to be here together, stretching out the evening’s events over terrible wine and shouting over people’s heads while snaking through to any available space. 

Art Night faces an uncertain future following last year’s Arts Council funding cuts. Yet, such initiatives – full of energy, communion and risky new work – have as much value as touring blockbuster shows. We need to create more spaces to be together, for things to get a little weird and weary but full of questions in the world's sweatiest pub, with your hand on the small of someone's back with nothing but potential ahead.   

^{Main image: Art Night Dundee, 2023. Courtesy and photograph: Tom Nolan}