LONDON.- Every Friday night this summer, the Serpentine Gallery presents talks, performances, film-screenings and a licensed bar in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, as part of its annual Park Nights programme. The Gallery’s exhibition Jeff Koons: Popeye Series will also be open every Friday night until 10pm during this time.

Themes of excess, extinction and the spoken word will be examined in this year’s Park Nights programme, which begins on Friday 24 July at 8pm with a presentation of films and lectures by groundbreaking German film-maker Alexander Kluge. The season culminates in October with the Poetry Marathon, the latest in the Gallery’s acclaimed series of Marathon events, conceived by Serpentine Gallery Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist. A major conference on the subject of extinction takes place near the Serpentine Gallery in November 2009, to coincide with the exhibition Gustav Metzger, opening on 29 September.

From a screening of the cult orgiastic satire, La Grande Bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973), and the terrifying, much-admired cautionary tale of contemporary global excess Darwns Nghtmare (Hubert Sauper, 2004), to a discussion about art’s surplus value led by renowned conceptual theorists Diedrich Diederichsen and Dorothea von Hantelmann, the notions of excess and consumerism will be investigated.

The series will also examine the spoken word by presenting the UK premieres of new plays and performances in the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd by the young artists Keren Cytter, Mathilde Rosier and Alexis Marguerite Teplin.

On Friday 7 August at 8pm, the Serpentine presents New Music Action in collaboration with OTO Projects. OTO is the Japanese word for music and OTO Projects will co-produce with the Serpentine an evening of experimental contemporary music from Japan that responds to the architecture of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009.