Nocturnal Creatures: Patrick Goddard

Performance, Installation, and Music

Focusing on the changing face of East London and its class politics, Bishopsgate Institute brings together a collection of Patrick Goddard’s new and old work spanning the last decade, displayed amidst a set of new immersive installations. Including films, audio works, bouncy castles, a mini grime rave and much more, this body of work also engages with the Institute’s extensive archive, focusing on the Bryant and May Match Factory, now the gated community ‘The Bow Quarter’, as well as its documents relating to the formation of council housing, particularly the project ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ which ushered in the age of social housing and the welfare state in the 1920s.  

The central work is a looping screening of Patrick’s comedy Looking for the Ocean Estate (34’00” / 2016 / SD video). The film takes the form of a mockumentary, purporting to explore the Ocean Estate in Stepney Green, East London after its regeneration and privatisation.  

Talking to a host of ex and current residents, the narrative unravels from an aural history project to become a questioning of the documentary and ethnographic assumptions of the film maker himself, with this flawed director (played by Patrick Goddard as a parody of himself) serving as a vehicle to critique a privileged class, gender and race perspective. A fictional film based on a real place and derived from ethnographic interviews, the film weaves together thoughts on gentrification, class antagonisms, and the enigmatic notions of authenticity.  

Bishopsgate Institute’s licensed bar will be open throughout the course of the evening.