BBC Arts at Museums At Night

Bringing together some of the BBC’s best known presenters and artists from around the country with experts from our leading institutions, this one-off BBC Two programme will capture the best of the three-day Museums at Night event and explore Britain’s love affair with our museums and galleries.

Presented by BBC’s Arts Editor Will Gompertz at the National Museum of Scotland, Museums At Night will feature live performances, chats with key industry players about the place of museums and galleries in the 21st century and short films from other Museums At Night events around the country.

Will Gompertz will be joined by three key people who have led the renaissance of UK museums and galleries today: Artistic Director of Southbank Centre, Jude Kelly; Amit Sood, founder of the Google Art Project and Director of Google’s Cultural Institute; and historian and presenter of the British Museum’s Vikings Live cinema show, Bettany Hughes, will thrash out the big issues facing museums and galleries in the digital age. Visitor numbers show that people can’t get enough of Britain’s museums. With the world at our fingertips, why hasn’t the internet dampened people’s appetite? How has our relationship to museums changed?

With actor Mat Fraser, Will also gets involved in events at the museum. He goes to his first Silent Disco and a pop-up opera, Love In A... Museum produced by the Edinburgh International Festival immerses us in the great tradition of the “art song”.

From St Anne’s allotments in Nottingham, a unique heritage site, we follow the internationally renowned photographer Rankin as he shoots, prints and displays an exhibition of photos of allotment owners in just one day.

At the Cardiff Story Museum, Janette Parris challenges 30 artists to recreate 30 objects in the museum for display during the festival weekend.

In the dead of night, art historian Andrew Graham Dixon takes a group of Hackney teenagers for a sneak preview of a hidden Rembrandt masterpiece that will feature at the National Gallery’s forthcoming blockbuster show.

Enjoying spectacular light displays and bustling crowds, author Frank Cottrell Boyce explores how his home town Liverpool, once the British Empire’s second biggest port, awoke from the dark days of 20th century recession with a new generation of museums and galleries that transformed the city’s fortunes and spirits.

Poet Simon Armitage and sculptor Tom Price go on safari around the Yorkshire Scultpure Park where works by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth are set against rolling hills and turbulent skies.

To celebrate our many amateur historians and collectors we visit two of the country’s unsung museum heroes - The Museum of Witchcraft in Cornwall and The Museum of Gas in Norfolk. We meet some of the passionate people who keep these archive gems alive and ask what it means to be an independent curator, archiving hidden histories for the nation.

BBC Two, Saturday 17 May, 7pm

BBC Arts Online

BBC Arts Online will feature a live stream from Imperial War Museum North beginning at 6.30pm on 17 May, ahead of the BBC Two transmission, and continuing at 8.00pm with a complete performance of Russell Maliphant’s new dance work Second Breath, performed by English National Ballet.

Presented by Martha Kearny, the live streams will feature coverage of Museums at Night events throughout the country as well as performances, discussion and live events within the Museum itself.

Films

Bill Fontana’s Vertical Echoes

The roar of a First World War biplane and the echoes of a field gun from the trenches will greet visitors to Imperial War Museum North – through the unique new sound sculpture created by American artist Bill Fontana. It launches ‘Reactions14’, a major contemporary art series to mark the First World War Centenary. Fontana’s critically acclaimed works have been installed in public spaces and museums around the world. The new art work at Imperial War Museum North in Manchester uses eight loudspeakers and vibration sensors to project the recorded sounds from the First World War.

Spencer Tunick in Folkstone 

Known for his nude photo installations, American photographer Spencer Tunick will be in Folkestone for George’s House Gallery as part of Museums at Night. He will photograph 250 volunteers on the beach and BBC Arts Online will be there to capture the work and speak to the artist and the participants involved.

Public Service Broadcasting

Electro pop band Public Service Broadcasting will be performing tracks from their The War Room EP at RAF Hendon. BBC Arts Online will show one of these tracks, Spitfire, which will be performed in front of an audience as part of Museums at Night.

Janette Parris 

Parris is heading to the Cardiff Story Museum, where she plans an impromptu site-specific musical based on displays from the offbeat museum’s collection. As part of her installation she has produced a line-drawing animation voiced by Bake Off presenter Mel Giedroyc. BBC Arts Online will show the two minutes animation in full.

Social Media and Online UGC Gallery

VanGoYourself

As part of a major social media campaign, Culture 24, the coordinating body for Museums at Night, is encouraging people to upload ‘cultural selfies’ of themselves recreating poses from selected famous paintings including Da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ and a Van Gogh self-portrait. BBC Arts Online has staged a reconstruction of each painting - these are featured in a short film which will be on the site at launch on 15 May to inspire our audiences to make and submit their own versions of the paintings. BBC Arts Online will be curating the best of the images to form a unique online gallery on the site.