Serpentine Galleries will launch Park Nights 2026 with a new performance by Vancouver-based musician Sophia Stel on 10 July, placing live music at the center of this year’s programme in the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens. The season opens with I feel amazing, a site-specific work that Serpentine says will transform LANZA atelier’s Pavilion into a stage, extending the institution’s long-running interest in presenting new commissions that respond directly to architecture.
Park Nights has been running since 2002, and Serpentine describes it as a series that has presented new works across art, music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion and technology. The 2026 edition continues that interdisciplinary format across selected evenings from July to October, with the Pavilion serving as the site for what the gallery calls “interdisciplinary artistic interventions.” The programme is presented in the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, designed by LANZA atelier, founded by Isabel Abascal and Alessandro Arienzo.
Sophia Stel’s opening performance is billed as an evening of music with producer and vocalist Sophia Stel. According to Serpentine, the work draws on her latest EP, How to Win At Solitaire (2025), and will weave together synthesizers, digital drums and electric guitar in a set that traverses alt-pop and indie rock. The gallery also says the performance explores the tension and fragility of the current moment. Park Nights 2026 presents the piece as a bespoke, site-specific event rather than a standard concert, underscoring the Pavilion’s role as an experimental performance space.
The wider season maps a broad field of contemporary music and performance. Chanel Beads, the stage name of New York City-based underground pop musician Shane Lavers, follows on 17 July with Your Day Will Come, a live set with vocal and guitar interludes. In September, visual artist and writer Ebun Sodipo presents Atlantic Cruises: The Sex Tour, a new iteration of her ongoing performance series rooted in Black feminist study. The season concludes in October with a new commission from visual artist, writer and musician Shala Miller, who will present her work in the UK for the first time. Each of these events is also staged in the Pavilion and presented under the Park Nights banner.
Serpentine’s framing suggests that the Pavilion itself remains as much the subject as the performances it hosts. For Stel, the gallery says the architecture becomes an active instrument for a new live work; for the series as a whole, the commission model continues Serpentine’s effort to link architecture with contemporary artistic practice. The 2026 Pavilion season runs from 6 June to 25 October, and Park Nights events are priced at £10, with concession tickets at £7.
Presented in collaboration with Stone Island Sound, the opening night signals how the Serpentine is positioning the Pavilion as a site where music, sound and architectural experience converge. For London’s summer art calendar, Park Nights 2026 matters not simply as a concert series but as a test of how a major art institution can use a temporary building to generate new forms of performance and public encounter.
