Times Square Arts Announces The Return Of MIDNIGHT MOMENT

Times Square Arts is excited to announce the return of Midnight Moment, the world's largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly from 11:57pm to midnight. Beginning this September through November, Times Square's screens will light up with site-specific video works by artists Kambui Olujimi, Optical Animal, and Zina Saro-Wiwa.

In April, Times Square paused the Midnight Moment series as it saw a significant decrease in public on the streets due to COVID-19. However, the Square still served as a crucial transportation route for New York City's essential workers - doctors and nurses, public transportation personnel, New York City's sanitation and safety workers, grocery store employees, delivery staff, restaurant workers, and more. As a result, Times Square Arts launched a unique public art project specifically for this audience with Messages for the City, a citywide PSA campaign in 300+ locations that featured messages of gratitude and pride for New York's essential workers designed by over 30 graphic designers and famous contemporary artists such as G.O.N.G. with Mel Chin, Jenny Holzer, Maira Kalman, Pedro Reyes, Edel Rodriguez, Carrie Mae Weems, and Christine Wong Yap.

"It is with great joy that we bring back the Midnight Moment series at a point where Times Square is beginning to see more and more people each day," said Jean Cooney, Director of Times Square Arts. "With our Midnight Moment program, Times Square Arts has the opportunity to offer New Yorkers safe and socially distanced public art in these shifting times. Whether in our public spaces or online we are committed to using all the resources we have to reconnect New Yorkers with their city and amplify artists' work."

As New York City begins to reopen, Times Square has seen a notable increase in daily visitors. Where it once saw 312,000 visitors a day, the iconic space had around 33,000 people passing through at the height of the pandemic. Now, with more than 68,000 people moving through the Square daily, Times Square Arts will commence the Midnight Moment fall season for New Yorker's to enjoy free, site-specific works by the following artists:

SEPTEMBER 2020
Kambui Olujimi
In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same (2013)
Partnership with Project for Empty Space, Newark, NJ

In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same combines footage of skies from around the world, morphed into a central, slow moving, mirrored image. To create the work, artist Kambui Olujimi collected over 40 views of the sky, shot at different times of day under a variety of weather conditions in various locations, including New York, Cuba, California, and Detroit. Referencing a universal longing for human connection amidst distance and infinitely shifting possibilities, quadrisected skies slowly fold into one another to create an other-worldly dawn. Illuminating the screens of Times Square every midnight in September, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same speaks to the evolving nature of the current social and political moment with a sense of collective transformation and notions of interdependence across time and place.

For audiences at home and under skies beyond New York, the work will also stream online for the month of September, set to a mash-up of the song "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" - the classic originally made famous by Dee Dee Warwick and later recorded by The Temptations and The Supremes. Combined with this audio, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same deepens its meditative investigation of longing and invites reflection on conventional notions of love.

In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same is presented in partnership with Project for Empty Space. Originally presented as a large-scale installation at The Brooklyn Museum in 2013, In Your Absence the Skies Are All the Same has also been exhibited at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. A related public artwork, Where the Sky Begins (2018), is permanently installed through the MTA Arts & Design at Avenue I station on the F Train in Brooklyn.

Also in September, Project for Empty Space (PES) will present WALK WITH ME, a collection of more than 200 ink works on paper by Olujimi, all derived from a single photograph taken in the late 1950s of Ms. Catherine Arline, who was the artist's longtime mentor, friend, and guardian angel. This solo exhibition will christen PES's new home in Downtown Newark and will be presented in celebration of the organization's 10-year anniversary, from September 12, 2020 to January 4, 2021 by reservation only.

OCTOBER 2020
Optical Animal
Projection Napping (2020)

Optical Animal is a Brooklyn based digital arts collective, directing and producing works of new media, cinema, video art, and audio. Their series Projection Napping is an ongoing site-specific video installation project that started in 2016. A play on the term "projection mapping" (the process of projecting and aligning content onto an irregular surface), the series features footage of sleeping people, projected at massive scale and seemingly nestled neatly into the architecture of urban buildings. Past exhibits have occurred in New York City, Berlin, and Rome.

In Times Square, a new, site-specific iteration of Projection Napping (2020) offers a shared moment of respite in a city that has long prided itself on "never sleeping." Amidst the backdrop of the city, a cast of New Yorkers snooze soundly or struggle to find comfortable positions, their bodies curled into the corners of the video frame as if they live within the confines of each space.

Optical Animal has created a special multi-channel version of Projection Napping for the particular dimensions of each of the digital displays that participate in the Midnight Moment program. These intimate portraits appear larger than life on the electronic billboards, juxtaposing private experiences with public exhibition, and suggesting hidden moments within the buildings behind the screens.

The creation of the piece was interrupted by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, with the lockdown in NYC forcing the production to be put on hold mid-way. Some of the initial concepts and strategies for how to film the rest of the piece needed to be rethought and redesigned in order to safely adhere to the new normal of production in NYC.

NOVEMBER 2020
Zina Saro-Wiwa
Table Manners (2014-2019),
Partnership with Brooklyn-based gallery Medium Tings

Zina Saro-Wiwa's "eating performances" expand to larger-than-life proportions across the screens of Times Square every midnight in November. Featuring individuals from the Niger Delta region, Table Manners (2014-2019) is an ongoing series in which the simple act of consuming a meal is staged as a celebration of community, tradition, and a collective act of memory. Each work begins with the name of the performer and the contents of their meal; the sitter then consumes their meal by hand while training their gaze directly at the artist's camera. Candid and vulnerable yet undeniably confrontational, the works also raise consciousness around the socioeconomic and political troubles the oil-producing Nigerian region faces.

Saro-Wiwa's documentation style forces the viewer to consume the names and realities of these individuals. Table Manners not only speaks to the cultures and traditions of the West African community, but as the artist notes, "a powerful exchange takes place when one not only eats a meal but watches a meal being consumed. One is filled up with an unexplainable and potent metaphysical energy that we normally pay no attention to. I am interested in the story that is fed inside the viewer of each performance." While the works address colonialism, racism, agency, and sexuality, the series is in many ways, for Saro-Wiwa, about place and power. The act of eating and consuming the food drawn from the land renders a quotidian action into a ceremony of import and ownership over cultural identity, firmly placing its subjects back into a landscape from which they have been displaced through global extractive forces.

Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn and received his MFA from Columbia University in New York City. Olujimi's work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His solo exhibitions include: Zulu Time at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; A Life in Pictures at MIT List Visual Arts Center; Solastalgia at Cue Arts Foundation; and Wayward North at Art in General. His works have premiered nationally at The Sundance Film Festival, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Mass MoCA. Internationally his work has been featured at The Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland and Para Site in Hong Kong among others.

Olujimi has been awarded residencies from Black Rock Senegal, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and MacDowell Colony. He has received grants and commissions from numerous institutions including The Jerome Foundation, NFYA/NYSCA Fellowship, and MTA Arts & Design. His work has been featured in news media and periodicals such as The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, CNN, PBS, and The New York Times. Monographs on his past project include Zulu Time (2017), Wayward North (2012), The Lost Rivers Index (2007), Walk the Plank (2006), and Winter in America (in collaboration with Hank Willis Thomas, 2006).

Optical Animal is a Brooklyn based digital arts collective founded by creative duo JR Skola and Max Nova. Since 2008, they have found a home in creating unique experiences that employ new ideas and technology, while remaining firmly rooted in the ancient human love for storytelling. Optical Animal has presented video and projection art at events and festivals around the world including Mutek IMG in Montreal, Art Basel in Miami, Adelaide Festival in Australia, NXNW in Toronto, and the Westbeth Gallery in New York City. Work by Optical Animal has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, the New World Symphony, Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Calvin Klein, Christian Louboutin, and the New York Times, among others.

Named after a vision his father had in a sweat lodge, Max Coyote Nova has been telling stories since childhood. In addition to creating both narrative and abstract video artwork, Nova composes and performs classical piano music and dabbles in quantum physics as a hobby. Nova is also professor of "Live Video Performance Art" at New York University.

JR Skola grew up in the grassy suburbs of New Jersey, fascinated by history, ephemera, and the great outdoors. A move to New York in the early aughts, and a career in graphic, sound, and video design, led him to the world of storytelling, video art, and the subsequent co-founding of Optical Animal. These days he is occupied by the exploration of analog materials and processes, their relation to a spirit of simplification, and their relevance in the evolution of AI.

Zina Saro-Wiwa (b. 1976, Port Harcourt, Nigeria) is an artist working primarily with video but also photography, sculpture, sound and food. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York as well as running a practice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where she founded the contemporary art gallery Boys' Quarters Project Space for which she regularly curates. Saro-Wiwa is one of Foreign Policy Magazine's Global Thinkers of 2016 recognized for her work in the Niger Delta. She was Artist-in-Residence at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn 2016-2017 and in April 2017 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts. Saro-Wiwa's interest lies in mapping emotional landscapes. She often explores highly personal experiences, carefully recording their choreography, making tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance as well as bringing cross-cultural and environmental/geographic considerations to bear on these articulations.