Art Night is a biennial contemporary art festival presenting ambitious new work by artists at pivotal moments in their career. The festival takes place in public spaces and civic buildings and crucially, it is free and everyone is welcome. This is the first time Art Night has had a full iteration outside London, and I am so happy it is in Dundee.

An important element of moving outside of London is supporting our desire to consider the possibilities of decentralisation, to work with local groups and artist-run spaces and support them to write their own narratives. Developing meaningful partnerships with local organisations and appointing a majority local staff is also an essential part of ensuring the festival feels like it's happening in a city rather than to it.

The ten artist commissions for Art Night Dundee comprise ambitious live events, installations, sound, performance and film. They will take place in central Dundee across a variety of spaces, including some of Dundee’s finest cultural institutions: Dundee Contemporary Arts, V&A Dundee, Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) alongside historic venues such as our two ships RRS Discovery and HMS Unicorn. We’re also working with some dreamy and important Dundee venues: The Little Theatre, Arthurstone Library, Baxter Park and Pavilion, and the pioneering Keiller Centre. The commissions will be presented alongside Inwith, a series of projects highlighting a cross-section of Dundee’s expansive art and communities programming. These include billboards, flower shows, trad music sessions and vending machines.

When inviting artists to make work for Art Night in Dundee, I spoke to them about the joy and tenderness of gathering socially after a long time apart. I referenced house parties, and the way various rooms hold different forms of activity – dancing in the living room, a meaningful conversation in the kitchen, meeting an old friend in the queue for the toilets, snogging on the stairs, crying with a friend in the garden.

For the ten Art Night commissions, artists have developed and presented work that binds their own practices and experiences to this singular place and time. Some are personal responses, opportunities to pause and reflect; some are informed by or created in collaboration with the people of Dundee; some of the projects point to global environmental and political concerns; some speak of love as a space for hope, and some promise to raise your public approval ratings

Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani will present 'My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be', a fantastical series of filmic tableau with a score by Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless.

Tai Shani, My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains and All the Bodily Remains that Ever Were and Ever Will Be, film stills, 2023

We’re showing Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon’s experimental opera-film 'History of the Present' at Dundee’s iconic theatre, The Rep. The work foregrounds Belfast working-class women’s voices to ask: who has the right to speak and in what way?

Nabihah Iqbal hosts a musical takeover, featuring performances by the artist and invited collaborators on RSS Discovery and later at the Arctic bar in the city centre.

Emma Hart’s 'BIG UP', which takes place in a multi-storey car park, is a celebration of raving, which she describes as an ongoing, fundamental force for good in her life.

'{stereo - type - music}' is a performance, installation and newsprint publication drawing together Richy Carey’s work with choirs, community groups and other collaborators across Dundee.

Saoirse Amira Anis presents a performance as an extension of her solo presentation at Dundee Contemporary Arts. 'symphony for a fraying body' takes inspiration from the watery music, rituals and folklore of Anis’ Scottish and Moroccan maternal and paternal cultures.