Nuart Aberdeen 2018 played host to 12 national, UK and international street artists and an extended Nuart Plus program of artist talks, panel debates, workshops, film screenings, walking tours and events that all provided an insight into contemporary debates surrounding the Street Art movement and foreground the site-specific paintings, installations and interventions across the city.
2018 Festival Theme - ' A Revolution of the Ordinary'
What mechanisms and values turn the ordinary into the ‘extra’ ordinary, how and who does it benefit the most?
Nuart Festival is based on the principle that art should be part of people’s everyday lives. Our events provide a platform to amplify those artists’ voices who challenge the status quo by offering a more accessible and ordinary way of engaging with visual art than art institutions can offer. Nuart are dedicated to creating
new dialogues and narratives between artist and audience in public space, where people can engage with art freely and on their own terms. Ordinary in this sense does not mean unreflective, conventional, common sense but rather the archetypal, the public, and the shared.
Street Art’s call is to reclaim and broaden the terms ‘Art’ and ‘Artist’; to remove the shame that those not privileged with an arts education often feel when employing these terms; a call to reconnect art, as well as language, with the everyday. Street Art is rooted in, and a direct response to, an urban milieu of zero-hours contracts, pound shops, benefit cuts and foodbanks. Whilst the demonization of the working poor is all but complete and the gentrification of pop culture continues apace, it is the street that acts as the grit in the oyster that eventually makes the pearl. Street Art is the vandal with a PhD.
Nuart Aberdeen 2018
