Serpentine Galleries has announced the 2026 edition of Park Nights, its seasonal live programme staged in the Serpentine Pavilion in Kensington Gardens, with visual artist and writer Ebun Sodipo set to present Atlantic Cruises: The Sex Tour on 25 September 2026 at 8pm. The performance will take place at the Serpentine Pavilion in London and is priced at £10, with a £7 concession rate.
Park Nights is a long-running part of Serpentine’s programme. According to the institution, the series has presented new work across art, music, film, theatre, dance, literature, philosophy, fashion and technology since 2002, with commissions responding to each year’s Pavilion design. For 2026, those interventions unfold in the Serpentine Pavilion designed by LANZA atelier, which the gallery says becomes the stage for selected evenings between July and October.
Sodipo’s contribution is positioned as a new iteration of Atlantic Cruises, an ongoing performance series rooted in Black feminist study. Serpentine describes Atlantic Cruises: The Sex Tour as a journey through histories of sexual dimorphism, fetish and the libidinal economy of race. The gallery also says the work is a polyphonic audio-visual conversation that maps “new languages and tools to speak about the body and the past for Black trans people of the future.”
The announcement places Sodipo’s commission within a wider 2026 Park Nights line-up that includes Sophia Stel on 10 July, Chanel Beads on 17 July and Shala Miller on 2 and 3 October. While those performances span music and improvised vocal work, Sodipo’s project extends the programme’s interdisciplinary remit into performance, video and writing, underscoring Serpentine’s longstanding effort to use the Pavilion as a site where architecture and live art are brought into direct contact.
Serpentine’s materials also connect the performance to Sodipo’s essay “I Guess I Gotta Help Myself,” published in the Serpentine Reader. The artist’s work, the institution notes, spans sound, performance, text, installation, video and sculpture, and is guided by Black feminist study. Serpentine says her practice uses collage and fabulation to explore real and imagined narratives of Black trans women’s presence, embodiment and interiority across the past, present and future.
The event matters beyond a single evening because it shows how a major contemporary art institution is using its seasonal live programme to foreground Black trans and queer histories in a public-facing architectural setting. Park Nights has traditionally functioned as a bridge between exhibition-making and performance, and Sodipo’s project continues that approach while centering questions of race, the body and historical narrative. In a year when the Pavilion itself is meant to frame new forms of encounter, Atlantic Cruises: The Sex Tour positions performance as a means of opening urgent social and artistic conversations in one of London’s most visible summer art venues.
