Science Gallery London teams up with LIFT 2024 for Bat Night Market

© Rain Wu. This is an AI-assisted image created with the support of Midjourney.

London’s biennial festival of international performance LIFT has launched its 2024 programme, and we’re proud to be a partner venue.

From 11 - 15 June 2024, we’ll be presenting the world premiere of BAT NIGHT MARKET created by Taiwanese artist Kuang-Yi Ku and UK designer Robert Johnson.

Today, in the face of global food shortages, humans need to re-examine our food sources. One option presenting itself as a sustainable and nutritious option is the unassuming bat. These flying mammals  have been a delicacy in some cultures for centuries, but this ancient dish is often viewed with distaste in the Western world.

Yet with many bat populations in decline, is it problematic to consume bats? Should they instead be revered for their vital impact on our ecosystem? How do we navigate notions of delicacy, distaste and interspecies empathy as we radically rethink the norms of global consumption?

Bringing together performance, speculative design and science, Bat Night Market invites audiences to step into a night market of the future and consider a plethora of entangled issues surrounding bats, including ecological crisis, the future of food, biosecurity and cultural sensitivities.

Creative R&D for this production took place in Taiwan and here at Science Gallery London: Kuang-Yi and Robert have collaborated with a number of King’s researchers on the production, including professor of tissue engineering Lucy Di Silvio; PhD researcher Martha Gallardo Galaviz; anthropologist Ann Kelly; and Gemma Bowsher, who works at the interface of health security and biological threats. Together, their combined expertise and scientific knowledge have helped design this imagined future.

Tickets are now on sale from liftfestival.com, with a limited number of £5 tickets available.