Midnight Cinema - Closing Event

Jonny Tanna Presents

*Midnight Cinema*

Harlesden High Street (Series 1, Episode 1)

Private View 4 Nov 2017 7-10pm

Closing Party 25 Nov 2017 6-9pm

https://www.facebook.com/events/320458011762421/

Exhibition: 31st Oct - 26 Nov 2017 

Open Daily: 12-6pm

Starring: Bora Akinciturk, Ayçesu Duran, Lara Joy Evans and Jon ArBuckle 
With a Special guest appearance by Roxanne Gatt

Description

Jonny Tanna presents Midnight Cinema, a project of collaborative activity that utilises and assembles a mix of outsider and emerging artists whose diverse practices are brought together to form a blended participatory occupation of both the gallery and online space.

Midnight Cinema is spawned from a frustration with the slow-drip effects of cultural terror induced by a dirge of contemporary mainstream music and the overt commercialism of video games by gaming companies whose primary concern is please the stockholders by charging monthly fees to enable users to simulate war on an assumed cultural enemy. The project identifies this mainstream cultural indoctrination and contrasts that with a nostalgia for a seemingly innocent AV/gaming experience of the recent past. Highlighting a concern for the effect of this onslaught of rampant commercialisation on modern culture, Midnight Cinema wages a battle to dissect and reconstitute contemporary culture, creating a rallying call for change.

Midnight Cinema is the first of a chronicle of gallery takeover shows under the banner Harlesden High Street, that engages with a process of development Jonny Tanna has faced working between pre and post internet artists through a collaborative platforming that enables dialogue between various sub-cultures and generations, and consequently informs the viewer of recent cultural dynamics and histories that have otherwise been overlooked by the rapid developments in throwaway culture. 

In pursuit of the idea that being self-serving is inherently self-defeating and that art belongs to no-one and everyone, the collaborative aspects that run throughout the project embrace multiple possibilities for the assimilation of new artworks. A fascination with approaching and dissecting the production of group ideas into form becomes apparent through the structure of the exhibition. In a complex overlaying of the content of an artists production, Midnight Cinema exposes itself as a mechanism for coping with the vulnerability of the artistic self by repurposing cultural layering into new forms of content that relate to the contemporary contexts in which we find ourselves thrown.

Full press release 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BziBm6Q4JctXSGU2OHlQMzQ0Slk

Invited Guest collaborators include:
Miro Arva
Thomas Hämén
Katya Kan
Ray Rollins
Hannah Rose Stewart
Tea D. Strazicic
Valinia Svoronou
Owen Thackeray
Eden Mitsenmacher
Victoria Valcheva

With a special performance by
Saeideh Yazea

Supported and Funded by Arts Council England
Assisted by Nina Coulson
Communications by Burkut Kum