Next up in Serpentine Gallery’s Park Nights series of live events in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei, is artist Ed Fornieles. For his Park Night, Fornieles hosts The Dreamy Awards to recognise the individuals and organisations helping to shape our current cultural and technological landscape. The Dreamy winners will represent the worlds of music, television, politics, business, technology and film, including Hollywood heart-throb Zac Efron, who will accept his award onscreen during the evening.
Fornieles’ performance, a special commission for the Serpentine Gallery, will exaggerate the format of a conventional awards ceremony to create a surreal and immersive participatory experience. Following a pre-event briefing with the artist, participants will be encouraged to assume a new identity for the evening and to embody and enact their new identities throughout the ceremony. Chosen characters range from princess to tech legend; from political spin-doctor to superstar DJ.
The Dreamy Awards maintains the artist’s interest in the construction of character. This focus is made manifest in Fornieles’ previous work, including Dorm Daze (2011) www.facebooksitcom.com, a Facebook sitcom he directed based on the contemporary American college moment as it exists on social media. Fornieles believes that the awards ceremony will foster an environment where people feel able and willing to perform a character that acts and communicates differently to them. The interconnectedness of this fictional network will be revealed on the night through suggested interactions and directed plot lines. Celebrity guests will mingle with the artist’s extended collaborative network and members of the public, creating a situation where social equality is forged through the shared experience of adopting a new character. This inclusive atmosphere, and people’s choice of character, will reveal both the artist’s and the audience’s contemporary fantasies.
A film of the event will be cut and made into an artwork that will appear on The Space www.thespace.org, a new free digital arts initiative developed by Arts Council England in partnership with the BBC.
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