Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 7:30pm
Night Fever

361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Presented by Shanay Jhaveri

Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, edited by Shanay Jhaveri, is a new collection of essays and artist portfolios that consider our encounters with the night, featuring a global roster of writers, photographers, and filmmakers. To mark the occasion of its publication, Light Industry will host an evening devoted to the book, including readings by Brendan Embser, Madeline Murphy Turner, Drew Sawyer, and Simon Wu; photographs by Stephen Barker, Suwon Lee, Ming Smith, and Kohei Yoshiyuki; and films by Benjamín Ellenberger, Marguerite Duras, Jeanne Liotta, and Tobias Zielony.

Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark is not an inventory of every work made in and about the night; nor is it a history of the night through art. Instead, it is committed to those lens-based practices that have found in the night the opportunity to rejoice and rebel, but also to seek rest, refuge and perhaps some revelation. These are the five informal axes on which the book revolves, none of which is mutually exclusive of the others, and they have guided the selection of an intergenerational group of contributors, who have worked and continue to work in diverse circumstances.

Collectively, these films and photo portfolios, as well as the newly commissioned essays, stress that there is no single night. As Djuna Barnes declared in her 1936 novel Nightwood, ‘the nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another.’ The films and photographs assert that for each person, place or group the night happens differently, and can be suffused with a range of emotional and physical experiences—joy, ecstasy, pain, fear, anxiety, mystery, tedium, inertia, exhaustion, peace. For a person, place or group, night’s threshold, its liminal edge, is ever-changing, dependent not only on the actual conditions of light and dark, but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment. Accordingly, Night Fever includes works that use the actual duration of a single night as a structuring principle, its start and end providing the formal parameters for a film or series of photographs, as well as works that encompass a succession of nights, while others are not made in the night at all but evoke the night or find traces of it in the following day.”

- SJ

Copies of Night Fever will be available for purchase, with a reception to follow the screening.

Shanay Jhaveri is the Barbican’s Head of Visual Arts. Previously, he was Associate Curator, International Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His books include Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design, Outsider Films on India: 1950 – 1990, and America: Films from Elsewhere.

FREE

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.

Above: Kohei Yoshiyuki, Untitled, 1973, from the series The Park. Courtesy Yossi Milo, New York.