Katie Tobin

---

Shanay Jhaveri on Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark  

Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, ed. Shanay Jhaveri, (Koenig Books, 2024), 424 pages, £34
.
.
Djuna Barnes mentioned that the nights of one period or city are not the nights of another. How do you see Night Fever illustrating these kinds of different experiences and representations of night?
.
That quote guided the selection of artists, photographers, and filmmakers that I wanted to feature in the book. It so clearly articulated what I had personally felt, and wanted the book to channel and communicate – the night is different in different contexts. The selection of work in the book starting from 1960 is by a group of international and intergenerational artists, filmmakers and photographers confirms that the experience of the night for an individual or group 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, group or place the threshold of the night, its liminal edge, is ever-changing dependent not only on actual conditions of light and darkness but also on the tenor of the socio-political environment. Accordingly, the book includes work that uses the duration of a single night as a structuring principle, as well as works that are made over a succession of nights or those which are not made at night at all but evoke the night or find traces of it in the following day.

 

Another quote here, but I really liked that you described Whitman’s poetry as kind of an algebraic invocation of a particular type of estrangement, and that conflicting sensation of being in the world and simultaneously removed from it, becoming aware of a piercing aloneness that only the night reveals. And I’m curious about how you relate to that idea. I mean, that’s kind of one particular vision of night, maybe night is kind of this more multifaceted thing to you?

This resonates with my personal experience of the night; the night as elusive, remote, enigmatic. A space where the ‘rules’ of the day fall by. The night as a fugitive. Nonetheless, that is only one-way experience of the night, and Night Fever makes that apparent pretty soon, it contemplates the night in five registers – rest, rejoicing, rebellion, refuge and revelation. This is keeping in mind how with the advent of late capitalism, our relationship with the night has altered, one clear way to map this is through the need to work and be productive extends into and through the night. Also, the widespread political instability in the world, how is that related to the night, one trajectory is the night as a space of refuge as in Shelly Kracier’s discussion of the plight of refugees in Wang Bings Ta’ang.

Feeding off that idea of a gendered experience having read the book as a woman, it’s interesting to think about my own relationship with nights and that I’m quite hesitant walking by myself alone at night. How specifically Night Fever works to address that gendered aspect of night and what it might mean to different groups?

It is one of the principal concerns of the book, the night as a gendered space. I highlight this through a series of photographs made by Rut Blees Luxemburg. We have a number of contributions that address this issue directly, Erika Balsom’s essay on Variety and Simone Barbes or Virtue talks about women who work at porn cinemas and their solitary journeys. Genevieve Yue’s essay ‘Night Work’ spotlights the labour of women as cleaners in The Nightcleaners Part 1 and Lynne Sachs Your Day is My Night. Jasmine C Pisapia looks at the work of Malena Szlam and Annie Jump Cannon, and their interest in the nocturnal landscapes and desire. Paz Errazuriz’s images of trans-identifying sex workers during the Pinochet regime in Chile, getting ready for the night speaks to their resilience and vulnerability.

I wanted to know how you approached the kind of pieces and photographers who document real nighttime experiences and the more abstract and metaphorical representations of night.

One of the things that was really important for me – and I think is evident in the book – is the embodied experience of the Night Fever.  It’s less a book that is investigating the dream state, the subconscious, or the technical achievements of making work about the night but in fact, it is about how does one get through the night.

It was clear when I embarked on this project that the night is an enduring and inexhaustible subject, and Night Fever needed to calibrate a more clear-sighted approach, and that became about being in the night. I set this framework up in my introduction, and in fact, it is hopefully communicated through the design of the book, which tries to capture the experience of being out at night, walking the night. For me, the artists, filmmakers, and photographers featured in Night Fever are actually a fellowship of nightwalkers, who all explore what it means to inhabit the night, to be in the night as corporeal, sentient, feeling beings.

Thinking about the historical Association of this time of danger, hedonism and labour, I was wondering if there are any works, or artists that you feel move against, or perhaps reinforce, those kinds of ideas in the book.

The book really circles around the multiplicity of experiences of the night. It is a time for hedonism, but also for work and protest. They exist simultaneously and even unfold concurrently. We have photo portfolios that capture each of these conditions, while there are others which are more contemplative such as Rinko Kawakuchi’s beautiful photographs. They are quieter, and calmer than the collective street scenes taken by Mo’osab Elshamy for instance. However, sometimes behind these ethereal images of the night sky, something else is lurking as suggested by Trevor Paglen’s photographs of satellites crisscrossing the earth.

So, while Night Feverfurther probes these ways of being in the night, it also investigates the idea of darkness not only literally but also metaphorically. How are artists addressing the political circumstances of the moment by working in and through darkness. Iggy Cortez’s offers an overview of the night as a meditation on national territories in his examination of work by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Laura Waddington and Diao Yinan.

 

As a last question, I was really interested about the importance of the sleeper in nighttime film and photography, and how artists like Andy Warhol and Sophie Calle, have explored this motif.

The sleeper is such an enigmatic form. Both Sophie Calle and Andy Warhol investigate it in distinct and compelling ways; using them as points of orientation, I began to think about other types of bodies of work for Night Fever that look at or depict bodies in rest. As this arc was threaded throughout the book, I was drawn to those images and films that challenged expected ideas and representations about resting at night. Not everyone goes to bed and gets up at the same time, circadian rhythms shift and at times are controlled by other circumstances. For example, David Goldblatt’s images of exhausted workers travelling back and forth in apartheid South Africa. Jean Ma’s essay on sleep and the relationship to power, Or Martina Mullaney’s images that dwell on shared mattresses. It becomes about the trace of the body, about homelessness, loneliness, precarity.

Elena Gorfinkel in her essay on Wanda reflects on falling asleep in cinema as a place of rest. Her essay brings the book back to the inextricable relationship between the movies and sleep! She ends her essay by mentioning an event that took place in Montreal in 1992, for the Guinness Book of World Records for staying awake through the longest-running duration of films ever screened. An account of the marathon narrates that the runner-up fell asleep for 2 minutes in a screening of Wanda. The contestant describes it as “The two minutes I slept during Wanda were the most pleasurable in my life.”
.
.
.

Image credit: Ming Smith, Grace Jones, Studio 54 (New York). © Ming Smith, courtesy of the Artist.
>
Shanay Jhaveri is the Barbican’s Head of Visual Arts. Prior to taking up his position in October 2022, he was Associate Curator of International Art from 2016 – 2022 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and completed his PhD at the Royal College of Art in London. Among the many exhibitions Jhaveri has curated are the ground-breaking retrospective Phenomenal Nature: Mrinalini Mukherjee at the Met Breuer in 2019, and Huma Bhabha’s Met Roof Commission We Come in Peace in 2018. He has published widely in various art journals, and has written books including Western Artists and India: Creative Inspirations in Art and Design, Outsider Films on India: 1950 –1990, and America: Films from Elsewhere.