Artangel is currently presenting another subtle and fascinating interactive project entitled Night Haunts as part of their Nights of London series. Conceived, written and devised by Sukhdev Sandhu, in association with Artangel, the project has been envisioned as a year-long investigation of and meditation upon London’s nocturnal life.
Writer Sukhdev Sandhu is posting Night Haunts as a series of nocturnal journal entries on www.nighthaunts.org.uk. The micro site has been specially designed by visual designer Ian Budden of Mind Unit and sound artist Scanner.
Nights of London began with artist David Blandy collaborating with young people from The Avenues Youth Project in Westminster. Together they made a documentary film, Radio Nights (2005), investigating the nocturnal worlds, musical innovations and the underground language of West London’s minority and pirate radio broadcasters. Further projects with night-time Londoners are in development led by artists such as George Chakravarthi, Janice Kerbel and Sarah Woodfine.
Night Haunts was launched on February 4th, 2006 and is exploring the nocturnal metropolis with small groups of people who wake, work or watch over the city of London at night.
In his introduction to Night Haunts, Sukhdev Sandhu asks, “Whatever happened to the London night? … It certainly feels to me as if the London night has been decommissioned… “ It is an alluring beginning and Sandhu continues to return to this and other questions as he leads us, like Alice, down the rabbit hole to other realities.
“There was a time, well over a century ago now, when…the night was seen as lawless, foreign territory teeming with rogues and banditos who took advantage of what Shakespeare called its “vast, sin-concealing chaos”…It snuffed out the civility and social etiquettes of daytime and brought back trace memories of an older London dense with eldritch forestry…The London night was a homegrown Africa that on-the-make writers scrambled to map and colonize.”
Sandhu laments,that now “…Night time in London…has been emperilled by New Labour’s vision…a blinging, pigeon-free, glass-fronted, private-finance-initiative-funded, cappuccino-sipping, Barcelona-mimicking, Euro-piazza festooned, Vanity Fair-endorsed, live-forever, things-can-only-get-better fantasia…Night London is endlessly studied and written about…as a potential cash-cow…The language of their reports is a flat-footed anti-poetry studded with allusions to strategic guidance, mechanism development and positive visions…Cost-benefit analyses are drawn up to wring maximum revenue streams from this new gold dream of a 24/7-capital.”
Sandhu asks himself and of course us, “How true are these laments? I will be flying above the city…with night-vision cameras that can pick out shirt labels from a height of over 2000 feet; wading through vast rivers of congealed grease and effluence in the sewers…spending time with the nuns of Tyburn who stay up throughout the night to pray for the souls of Londoners…What will I find on these forays across London at night? I’ve no idea: that’s exactly why I’m going on them.”
Over the course of the year Sukhdev Sandhu will trace and record his night time adventuring alongside London’s inhabitants of the night. Sandhu’s forays will take him prospecting with the people who drive its pulse: From the avian police to security guards, zookeepers, night cleaners and exorcists.
Sandhu reflects on these journeys and on the nature of the urban night. The questions he poses are followed poetically, deeply, and delicately; like the many intersecting threads of a web.
Does the quality of night change between 1am and 4am?
Has ‘night life’ been corroded and colonised by light and entertainment?
What are the invisible economies that pulse through the sleeping city?
Does the Thames change its character at dusk?
Is authentic darkness impossible?
Do we need darkness?
Using as his inspiration, the Edwardian travel writer H.V. Morton’s book Nights of London, Sandhu takes us on a contemporary odyssey. In his travels Morton discovered the worlds of the “work-o’nights” or “owls of London”. Those night workers who repaired the Underground, partied in Chinese cafés in Limehouse, printed newspapers and indulged in bare-knuckle boxing. Sandhu, however, is no tourist, he takes us on far more compelling and interior wanderings than Morton could ever have dreamed of.
It is impossible to describe the actual experience of visiting each Night Haunts episode; of hearing, reading, seeing and sensing the complex layering of voices, impressions and residues of Sandhu’s night moves through an almost-foreign land. But not foreign, it is after all, London. Sandhu leads us into the night and into the thoughts and movements of the night class.
Ian Budden the web designer explains it this way, “…We’ve developed a virtual landscape that reflects the physicality of Sukhdev’s experiences.”
Drawing on the vast bank of cultural imagery and reflecting upon the metropolis’ glorious and sordid past; Sandhu casts a poet’s eye across London and discovers much. The first couple of installments of this stunning and often moving journal cover a diverse group of night inhabitants.
Sandhu’s journeys with the avian police create a blade-runneresque sense of London. This is a London where extraordinary flying machines navigate the dark hours within whiskers of gigantic edifices as they search for criminals and investigate oddities. In another journal, London’s night cleaners take us on a tour of the city’s excesses and waste heaps. We witness this metropolis through the eyes of citizens mired in poverty, who barely see the light of day. A story of broken dreams; London is the city of fools paved with impossible gold. And loneliness takes us into the harrowed heart of London’s volunteer-run telephone crisis centre. Each journal episode is unique and filled with Sandhu’s exasperatingly accurate and painfully humane reflections on the city’s life.
Night Haunts really succeeds in its creation of a parallel reality; lt is a matrix of poetic word, soundscape and visual design. The collaborative process has been thorough and is therefore very satisfying artistically. Night Haunts seems to be about the privilege of the outsider as much as it is about otherness or other-where-ness.
Night Haunts Artists
Writer: Sukhdev Sandhu in his book London Calling brilliantly chronicles the way in which Black and Asian writers have experienced and re-imagined the city since the1770’s. His latest book, I’ll Get My Coat with Usman Saeed, was launched in October 2005. He is a film critic for the Daily Telegraph and was named Critic of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2005. He regularly participates in public and radio debates, and his writing has appeared in a range of publications including the London Review of Books, Modern Painters, Smoke and Times Literary Supplement. He lives in Whitechapel.
Sound designer: Scanner, aka, Robin Rimbaud is a British artist who traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form. Scanner creates absorbing, multi-layered sound pieces that twist technology in unconventional ways. Born in London, Scanner is committed to working with avant-garde artists from a variety range of disciplines; including dance, music, and the visual arts. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sound art, producing concerts, compositions, installations and recordings.
Visual designer: Ian Budden, of Mind Unit, has been creating exciting websites since 1999. His creative passions include finding new ways to envision the virtual spaces of websites and engaging with the medium as well as creating projects that meet the highest accessability standards. Mind Unit works exclusively for the arts and for theatre.
About Artangel
Artangel is a unique and innovative arts commissioning body which has pioneered new ways of engaging and collaborating with artists and their audiences.
In an ambitious and groundbreaking series of commissions since the early 1990s, Artangel has created a reputation for producing work that people really want to see and for which they will travel miles to experience.
This commitment to the production of powerful new ideas by exceptional artists has been at the forefront of Artangel’s work. Changing attitudes and growing expectations amongst both artists and audiences have been just two of the outcomes of their commissioning and programming style.
Artangel aims to produce the very best art, in the best possible conditions. The company has become a leading voice in cultural debate both in the UK and abroad. Artangel’s mission is to achieve a deeper understanding of the world in which we live through a deeper engagement with art.
The work of Artangel is focused beyond the gallery, the theatre or the cinema. Artangel is committed to forms of expression where the relationship between the particular artist and the specific place is of primary importance. This is the relationship which Artangel actively explores in events where context and content are often indistinguishable. An artist’s response to the qualities and conditions of a particular place, time, and set of conditions is central to the development of a site-specific project. And finding the right place is an integral part of the commissioning process Artangel undertakes.
“Artangel has drawn sizeable audiences to places that have never been on the arts map… they are truly on the side of the angels.” The Independent
Artangel doesn’t set agendas for artists: rather the organisation chooses to work with filmmakers, writers, visual artists, composers, choreographers and performers who can respond to the unique opportunity offered by the Artangel project.
Artangel offers artists the possibility of taking their work a step further and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. In a 1993 Artangel project, artist Rachel Whiteread had the chance to cast a whole house. This was a logical progression from her previous work; the casting of smaller domestic spaces. The resulting work was one of the most powerful and controversial public sculptures ever seen in England and the public’s response to the work could not have been anticipated.
Artangel endeavours to explore new and uncharted territory, to give a project the breathing space it requires. This patient, collaborative and open-ended development process has been crucial to their success as an arts organisation.
“Some of the most ambitious and memorable work of the last decade…” Time Out
Artangel’s commissioning programme includes projects and events that extend opportunities for collaboration and participation. Artangel’s Interaction projects are led by artists working with small groups of people as creative collaborators. These projects take participants’ lifestyles, interests and passions as a starting point to build a shared sense of wonder and achievement in the artistic process. The Interaction programme concentrates on involving people who aren’t reached by conventional education or outreach work and who have little access to the arts. Wherever possible, Interaction projects happen outside institutional settings.
Night Haunts is the latest in Artangel Interaction’s ongoing series of artist-led projects, Nights of London, exploring the nocturnal city with the people who wake, work and watch over it.
Artangel Publishing records projects via the production of books, videos and CD’s. The publications are imaginative monographs of individual projects. Their form is conceived and realised in close collaboration with the artist.
Night Haunts is made possible with the kind support of Mala Gaonkar. Artangel Interaction is funded by Arts Council Lottery, John Lyons Charity and the support of Vincent and Elizabeth Meyer.
Artangel is supported by Arts Council England, London, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Company of Angels, and Artangel International Circle.
For more information about Artangel and the Nights of London project go to:
www.artangel.org.uk
www.nighthaunts.org.uk
www.nightsoflondon.org.uk
www.thedailytelegraph.co.uk