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RISE UP!
RISE UP!
Nuart produces both temporary and long-term public artworks as well as facilitates dialogue and action between a global network of artists, academics, journalists and policy makers surrounding street art practice. Our core goal is to help redefine how we experience both contemporary and public art practice: to bring art out of museums, galleries and public institutions onto the city streets and to use emerging technologies, to activate a sense of public agency in the shaping of our cities.
Outside of Nuart Festival, our growing portfolio of projects represents an on-going art and education program that seeks to improve the conditions for, and skills to produce, new forms of public art both in Stavanger and further afield. For us, public spaces outside conventional arts venues offer one of the richest, most diverse and rewarding contexts in which this can happen.
Our work is guided by our belief in the capacity for the arts to positively change, enhance and inform the way we think about and interact with each other and the City.
The Real Power of Street Art
Nuart festival presents an annual paradigm of hybridity in global sanctioned and unsanctioned street art practice. Through a series of large and human scale public artworks, murals, performances, art tours, workshops, academic debates, education programs, film screenings and urban interventions, supported by a month long exhibition of installations, Nuart explores the convergence points between art, public space and the emergent technologies that are giving voice and agency to a new and more creative civilian identity, an identity that exists somewhere between citizen, artist and activist.
The real power of “street art” is being played out daily on walls, buildings, ad shelters and city squares the world over, and it’s now obvious that state institutions can neither contain nor adequately represent the fluidity of this transgressive new movement. As the rest of the world begins to accept the multiplicity of new public art genres, it is becoming more apparent, that street art resists both classification and containment. The question is, not how can this inherently public art movement be modified or replicated to fit within the confines of a civic institutional or gallery model, but how can the current model for contemporary art museums, galleries and formulaic public art programs, be re-examined to conform with the energy of this revolutionary new movement in visual art practice.
In the 1990’s, Situationist concepts developed by philosopher Guy Debord, surrounding the nature of “The City”, “Play” and the “Spectacle”, alongside sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s theories exploring the rights to shape our own public and mental space, came together to form an emergent adbusting “artivism”, which now forms the foundation of street art practice. Radical cultural geographer David Harvey has stated, “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources, it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”.
It is here, at the intersection between philosophy, geography, architecture, sociology, politics and urbanism, that Nuart situates itself, it exists as a critique of the colonization of everyday life by commodity and consumerism, whilst recognizing that one of the only radical responses left, is to jettison the hegemonic, discursive and gated institutional response to capitalism, and engage it directly where it breeds and infects the most, in our urban centers.
The challenge for a new and relevant public art isn’t to attempt to negate capitalisms neoliberal market logics with an ever more dominant liberal discourse, both are ultimately mired in a conflict that on the surface simply serves to feed the polarization and spectacle that we’re attempting to transcend. What we need is the active participation of citizens in the creation of their own holistically imagined environments, both physical and mental, a direct and collective response to space that leads to the shaping of place. A place in which the disengaged and passive citizens desired and ever more manipulated by market forces, are inspired to re-make themselves. Nuart proposes that the production of art in public spaces outside conventional arts venues offers the community, not only the most practical, but also the richest, most relevant and rewarding contexts in which this can happen.
It is in this “remaking” of self, this deep desire to engage with the world, to develop civic agency and purpose, that transcends identity, gender and class, and enables those locked out of the arts by a post-Adorno obscurant lexicon (eh?), that street art delivers. It offers an opportunity to reconnect, not only with art, but also with each other. Hundreds of people covering a vast swathe of demographics, from toddlers and single moms to refugees and property barons, on a street art tour conversing with each other, are testament to this.
We believe that when you want to challenge the powerful, you must change the story, it’s this DIY narrative embedded within street art practice, that forms the bonding agent for stronger social cohesion between citizens from a multiplicity of cultures, as our lead artist for 2017, Bahia Shehab will attest. It is this narrative, that is acting as the catalytic agent towards street art becoming a vehicle capable of generating changes in politics as well as urban consciousness.
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from what kind of person we want to be. The transformation of urban space creates changes in urban life, the transformation of one, being bound to the transformation of the other. What social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies, art and aesthetic values we desire, are closely linked to the spaces we inhabit. The “banalization” of current city space, combined with the numbing effect of digital devices that guide us from A to B, have rendered us passive. Consumer cows sucking at the teat of capital trapped in a dichotomy between left and right, instead of right and wrong. And for the most, the hegemonic islands of sanitised cultural dissent we call Art Institutions, are either unable or uninterested, in engaging with the general public in any meaningful way.
In the early 2000’s, the evocative power of certain already existing and often crumbling industrial interzones, including that of Tou Scene, our main exhibition space, one that we were instrumental in establishing, gave rise to a new form of engagement with art in urban spaces that is only now being fully recognized and exploited. Street Art is at times of course co-opted and complicit with the “creative destruction” that the gentrification process engenders, but Capitalism’s continuous attempt to “instrumentalize” everything, including our relationship to art should be vigorously resisted. It is these “Stalker-esque” zones of poetic resistance, that initially gave shelter to one of the first truly democratic , non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist art forms, and unlike most cultural institutions, it is still, for the most, unafraid to voice this opinion, important in a time when even our art institutions are beginning to resemble houses of frenzied consumption. Street art exists to contest rather than bolster the prevailing status quo. As such, it is picking up as many enemies as friends within the field of public art.
By attempting to transform the city, street art attempts to transform life, and though by no means is all street art overtly political, it does, in it’s unsanctioned form at least, challenge norms and conventions regulating what is acceptable use of public space. In particular, it opposes commercial advertising’s dominion over urban surfaces, an area that Nuart are active in “taking over” throughout the year and in particular during the festival period. Our curating initiatives not only aim to encourage a re-evaluation of how we relate to our urban surroundings, but to also question our habitual modes of thinking and acting in those spaces. Street art is not just art using the streets as an artistic resource, but also an art that is questioning our habitual use of public space. Street art doesn’t simply take art out of the context of the museum, it does so whilst hacking spaces for art within our daily lives that encourage agency and direct participation from the public, “Everyone an artist” as Joseph Beuys would have it, and if it is accussed of being produced without academic rigour, we are reminded that he also asked, “Do we want a revolution without laughter?”.
Nuart’s programs are designed specifically to explore and silently challenge the mechanisms of power and politics in public space. Increasingly, we see the rights to the city falling into the hands of private and special interest groups, and yet, we have no real coherent opposition to the worst of it. The 20th Century was replete with radical Utopic manifestos calling for change, from Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto of 1909 to Murakami’s “Superflat” of 2000. Nuart’s annual academic symposium, Nuart Plus, acts as a platform for a resurgency in utopic thinking around both city development and public art practice, and whilst recognizing that street art is often co-opted and discredited by capital, it also recognises that even the most amateur work, is indispensable in stimulating debate and change in a Modern society that has developed bureaucracies resistant to seeing art, once more, as part of our everyday life.
As the Situationst graffiti scrawled on Parisian walls in 1968 stated, Beauty is in the streets, so Rise Up! and support those dedicated to unleashing one of the most powerful communicative practices known to mankind, there’s work for art to be done in the world amongst the living.
Martyn Reed, July 2017
NUART PLUS 2017 PROGRAM
Our at-a-glance program of keynote speeches, presentations, panel debates and workshops
Nuart Plus 2017 – Jan Zahl in conversation with Ian Strange
(VIDEO) Artist Ian Strange discusses his career and work to date with Jan Zahl, Arts Editor at Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper.
Nuart Plus 2017 – Promises not kept: Art, the art institution and social change
(VIDEO) Keynote speech by Mikkel Bolt (DK)
Nuart Plus 2017 – Revolution, From the Artist’s Perspective
(VIDEO) Artist presentations by Carrie Reichardt (UK) and Igor Ponosov (RU) followed by a Q&A session with Evan Pricco (US).
Nuart Plus 2017 – From Cairo: I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing
(VIDEO) Artist presentation by Bahia Shehab (EG)
Nuart Plus 2017 – Brave – Nuart × Amnesty International
(VIDEO) Brave: Nuart × Amnesty International present the case of Human Rights activist Sakris Kupila
Nuart Plus 2017 – DIY Culture & New Utopias + Panel debate
(VIDEO) Presentations by Adrian Burnham (UK), Pascal Feucher (DE) and Addam Yekutieli aka Know Hope (IL) Followed by a panel debate led by Carlo McCormick
Nuart Plus 2017 – Creating New Cultural Heritage and "Rights to the City"
(VIDEO) Creating New Cultural Heritage and "Rights to the City"
Presentations by Laima Nomeikaite (LT), Javier Abarca (ES), Emma Arnold (CA) and Susan Hansen (UK)
ARTIST PRESENTATION BY VERMIBUS (DE)
Join Berlin-based ad-buster and artist Vermibus for a multimedia presentation about his unique brand of activism.
FIGHT CLUB - REVOLUTION OR EVOLUTION
The latest installment of Nuart’s legendary Fight Club, established in 2012 as a way to introduce difficult topics in a more relaxed environment condusive to publ...
JAN ZAHL (NO) IN CONVERSATION WITH IAN STRANGE (AU)
Artist Ian Strange discusses his career and work to date with Jan Zahl, Arts Editor at Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper
SEMINAR DAY 1 : REVOLUTION
Join us for Day 1 of the Nuart Plus program, all events are free unless otherwise stated
SAVING BANKSY (SCANDINAVIAN PREMIERE)
The film that asks the question: ‘What would you do if you woke up one morning and found a million dollar Banksy spray-painted on the side of your building?’
BRAVE : NUART x AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PANEL DEBATE
Nuart x Amnesty International present the case of Human Right's activist Sakris Kupila
SEMINAR DAY 2 : EVOLUTION
Join us for Day 2 of the Nuart Plus program, all events are free unless otherwise stated
TRAFO WORKSHOP WITH CARRIE REICHARDT (UK)
Take part in a unique mosaic workshop with artist Carrie Reichardt - and produce an outdoor mural at this year’s Nuart Festival!
RISE UP!
Essay by Nuart founder and curator Martyn Reed that sets the theme and tone of this years event
THE RIGHT TO WRITE THE CITY: BREAKING THE LAW OF UNTOUCHABILITY
by Susan Hansen
ECONOMICAL POWER – LISBON URBAN ART CASE STUDY
By Pedro Soares Neves
SOME NOTES ON STREET ART, MURALS AND POWER IN PUBLIC SPACE
By Javier Abarca
CARLO McCORMICK (US)
Pop culture critic, curator and Senior Editor of PAPER magazine
EMMA ARNOLD (CA)
Cultural geographer and doctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo
JAVIER ABARCA (ES)
Artist, researcher and educator in the fields of graffiti and street art
LAIMA NOMEIKAITE (LT)
City planner and human geographer, engaged at The Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) since 2016
MIKKEL BOLT (DK)
Art historian and political theorist, employed as a lecturer in cultural history at the Department of Arts and Culture, University of Copenhagen
PASCAL FEUCHER (FR)
Founder and manager of Urban Spree in Berlin, Germany
PEDRO SOARES NEVES (PT)
Researcher, designer, urbanist and co-creator of Lisbon Street Art & Urban Creativity international research topic
SUSAN HANSEN (UK)
Convenor of the Visual Methods Group and Chair of the Forensic Psychology Research Group in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University, London