Join us on the dance floor as we celebrate community, spark connections, and mark another year of Open City Documentary Festival. Inspired by the counter-histories of rave culture, the party will feature DJ sets from Mark Leckey (NTS) and DJ Food (Ninja Tune/Telepathic Fish), alongside light projections from Insight Lighting, Heavy Flow, and Turbulent Light. Curated by Sophia-Satchell-Baeza.
Tickets for this event are pay what you can. Rich Mix will take a small booking fee and the remaining box office will be donated to Gaza Formula Fund.
The line up includes:
DJ Food
Strictly Kev aka DJ Food has been DJing since the mid-80s, co-founding the underground ambient Telepathic Fish parties in the early 90s before helping the Ninja Tune label flourish throughout the decade. He featured on Coldcut’s Solid Steel radio show for 25 years, toured internationally and designed many of their classic releases under the name Openmind. His first book, Wheels of Light, was published in 2022 showcasing the art of analogue light show wheels and he continues writing and researching for a number of forthcoming books.
Mark Leckey
Mark Leckey is a British contemporary artist. His practice takes various forms including video, installation, performance, and sound, to address notions of memory and class, desire and identity. Leckey’s work focuses on the effects of technology on popular culture, often through the rhetoric of British youth and subcultures. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the 2008 Turner Prize. He has a monthly music show on NTS.
Insight Lighting
Insight Lighting is an audiovisual practice founded by Brendan Clarke, who began creating experimental light shows while studying at Camberwell School of Art in the late 1980s. Starting with TV monitors and slide projectors, he produced visuals for the early rave scene and artists including The Orb, later collaborating with musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Ahmad Jamal, and Arun Ghosh.
Emma Smith, formerly an artist, curator, and art consultant with works held in the Saatchi and Arts Council Collections, joined Brendan in 1997. Their early collaboration, Traffic, transformed Curtain Road into an “exploded gallery” of projected works by artists such as Dan Graham, Hillary Lloyd and John Smith. Since then, Insight Lighting has created permanent public commissions, immersive projection environments, liquid light performances, and large-scale CRT video walls, while continuing to champion analogue and time-based media technologies.
Heavy Flow
Moving from effluvia to the cosmos and back again, Heavy Flow is a liquid light show run by Sophia along with some special guests. Get ready to surf the crimson wave.
Turbulent Light
Turbulent Light is a live projection project by visual artists Julian Hand and Heena Song. Step into a realm where visuals and music fuse into a hypnotic, immersive experience. Their liquid light projections translate sound into a living, breathing spectacle—swirling colours, shifting patterns, and fluid motion unfolding in real time, intimately responding to live performance.