The ‘metaphorical nightclub’ slash art installation comes from designer Tom Hingston
REBELS is the fourth instalment of Veuve Clicquot’s Widow Series. The annual creative event is a journey through British subculture, and is launching this year on November 15 on London’s South Bank.
Previous curators include Nick Knight, FKA twigs, and Carine Roitfeld. This year, the event is taking place across three evenings, and is the vision of renowned creative director and designer Tom Hingston. As the founder of his eponymously titled Hingston Studio, Hingston has collaborated in the last 20 years with Grace Jones, Nick Cave, The Chemical Brothers, The Rolling Stones, Sade, David Bowie, Lady Gaga and Massive Attack.
REBELS is presented as a sequence of immersive installations, or Six Collaborative Rooms, each of which embraces a different discipline: music, film, fashion, art, sculpture and performance. The core concept is the one of a “metaphorical nightclub”, with the aim of creating, in each Room, a unique atmosphere where visual art draws parallels with radical social movements from punk, to soundsystems, to rave.
Hingston explained to Dazed in an email, “Using the ‘club’ as a device gives us a contemporary framework to tell the Clicquot story, without it feeling like a history lesson. It also serves as a powerful reminder of how defining some of these moments in British culture were moments that initially shocked, but were then imitated the world over. That's exactly why the concept resonates, because the language of club culture is universal – we each have our own personal experiences of night culture and its egalitarian environment – the club, the gathering, the festival. That’s true all over the world… We also recognise the role that those individual scenes have played in influencing some of the most exciting output from this country – be it in music, film, fashion or art.”
Collaborators on the event include legendary photographer Nick Knight (who has created a new film on punk specifically for the Widow Series); Mercury Prize winners Young Fathers with a film installation; artists Rebecca Louise Law and Anna Burns; photographic and filmmaking duo Warren Du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones; Mo’Wax Founder James Lavelle; light installation artist Chris Levine; Joe Goddard of Hot Chip, and Savages singer Jehnny Beth with producer Johnny Hostile. There’s also music from iconic singer-songwriter Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack.
Tickets for the 15, 16, and 17 November are available here.
