Art Night London, 2019

In 1993 the London pop group East 17 (named after the postcode of their home borough of Walthamstow) released their single It’s Alright. The song of the same title is providing the inspiration for this year’s Art Night festival, stretching from King’s Cross to Walthamstow, with artists encouraged to embrace ideas of hope, love and the future.

Art Night is London’s largest, free contemporary arts festival and most of the works are site specific, utilising some unlikely locations. This year will see pop-ups at a Polish deli, a fishmongers, a church and a car park. Festivities start at 5pm in King’s Cross and 7pm in Walthamstow and run throughout the night.

ACUTE ART, Marina Abramović, still from Rising. Courtesy of Acute Art

There have been more than 40 projects announced for this year’s programme, including local and internationally acclaimed artists. Marina Abramović’s virtual reality piece Rising (2018), which explores the perils of climate change, will be at the Everyman Cinema in King’s Cross. The nearby Granary Square, outside Central Saint Martin’s, will be transformed by performers in a celebration of the centenary of Bauhaus, a spectacle that promises colour and energy. The party atmosphere will stretch to Pancras Square, where Melodian’s Steel Orchestra will play songs of hope and love from the 80s and 90s, spanning jazz, calypso, pop and acid house.

The fun continues at various sites in Walthamstow. The Waltham Forest Feel Good Centre will host the very first OOF Cup, a five-aside football tournament staged by the people behind the art and football magazine OOF. Teams from Lisson Gallery, the Art Newspaper, Christies and Victoria Miro – to name but a few – will battle it out for the cup and each match will be played with a football designed by Turner Prize winning artist Mark Wallinger.

OOF MAGAZINE, Mark Wallinger and One World. Photo: John Nguyen

The festival also includes 12 commissions from a range of acclaimed artists such as Barbara Kruger, who is known for her bold political collages, and Turner Prize nominated painter Oscar Murillo. Emma Talbot will exhibit a series of paintings on silk at the William Morris Gallery, (in addition to other Walthamstow locations), in response to the work of spiritualist Madge Gill, born locally in 1882. An exhibition of Gill's work will also open on the same night.

Emma Talbot, ’Suspended In Natural Space-Time’ (2019) Photo: Emma Talbot

All in all, this year's Art Night promises to be full of surprises and with themes of hope, love and the future, it might also provide the perfect tonic to all the current Brexit negativity. So leave your troubles behind, if only for a night, and get lost in a festival of art designed to bring joy colour to our multicutural capital.