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You can sleep all day and party all night at this new contemporary arts festival sprawling across the East End this weekend. It’s called Nocturnal Creatures, and has been organised by the Whitechapel Gallery in association with Sculpture in the City, allowing performances, video, sound and more to pulse through the capital after dark.
There will be works by London Open 2018 artists, three actors will be doing hourly recitals of Alexis Teplin’s mesmerising performance piece ‘Arch (the Politics of Fragmentation)’ and the gallery’s bar will be filled with space-age electro and cosmic funk while you make the most of happy hour. Other buildings and venues within scuttling distance will be keeping the padlocks off come twilight, too.
Just across the street, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was responsible for making some of the world’s most famous bells until it closed last year, will be opening its doors for a special installation created by Rachel Pimm exploring themes of agriculture, ecology, and military and political histories of materials. Now void of bells and the materials to make them, the space will be reanimated to map out where they once were cast, to a score of whirring machinery by audio artist Graham Cunnington.
Continue your date with the night with artist-led tours of Sculpture in the City, where artworks by the likes of Marina Abramović, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin are dotted among architectural landmarks, then wind up in Broadgate where multimedia artist Tom Lock will present a live and expanded version of his audio-visual work ‘Within’ (2018). Get working on your night moves.
Nocturnal Creatures takes place Sat Jul 21 in various east London locations, and it’s all free
Prefer all your art in one place? Check out the best exhibitions in the city