UK Street Art duo Snik kicked off last week this year’s Nuart Festival with two large murals using a delicate line-based technique creating elaborated stencil drawings with clear influences from the Pre-Raphaelites, a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The murals were painted two weeks before the official start of the 18th edition of world-renowned Nuart Festival in Stavanger which this year will make us explore Taking this year’s theme to heart, Space Is The Place, encouraging artists to step away from the usual track and work outside the framework of the festival.
The festival aims to provide a platform for national and international artists who operate outside of the traditional art establishment and allow them to leave their mark on the walls of this charming city.
The first of the two murals, painted at the legendary Tou Scene, was titled ‘Gone Believer’ and designed with the surrounding ivy in mind, which over time will grow back to create a living, breathing, organic artwork perfectly in tune with its surroundings.
The second mural, titled ‘Places we stay’, was painted in the arrivals hall of Stavanger airport. In addition to present a new technical approach to stencils, both murals feature female figures wearing flower crowns and nothing else but a cloth around their torsos.
This year’s edition of Nuart Festival in Stavanger takes its title from Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist jazz classic Space is the Place (here), alongside botanist Gilles Clemént’s work on The Third Landscape, Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones. but also illustrates the fact that for some people, art is the only way to escape the violence of reality.
As part of this year’s Nuart’s International Street Art Conference (6-8 September 2018), the organisers will be launching the first issue of Nuart Journal. The journal will be simultaneously released online – and will be free to access for all.
Nuart Journal is a forum for critical discourse and commentary on urban art cultures and street art practice. The inaugural issue marks a pivot point in the development of what could be termed a ‘critical street art’.
Editor-in-Chief Martyn Reed explains that the theme ‘Space is the Place’ returns us to the subversive and foundational activity of contesting public space – and thus creating spaces of creativity, and resistance, and “giving agency to non-artists.” He argues that this practice of contesting public space, in many ways, defines a critical street art – whether this be independently sanctioned or unsanctioned; human scale or monumental; radically ephemeral or heritage protected.
“This year we’re encouraging artists to work as much as they can outside the framework of the festival, to get off the beaten track and explore the periphery: the side alleys, the edgelands and those less obvious spots in and around the city, areas with the possibility of creating one-to-one encounters between the work and the individual. This is not to say we’re abandoning the production of large-scale works – we recognize that these are an important and valuable aspect of the culture – but to inspire agency in others we believe it’s important to bring the work back to a more human and less authoritarian scale. Ultimately, and perhaps paradoxically, we’re here to support the ‘disorganisation’ of the festival and offer the opportunity of greater freedom, of greater space for artists to move through and work in. Uncurating if you like.
In doing so, we hope to act as a counterweight to the growing forms of spatial exclusion attached to shrink wrapped consumerism and the authoritarian monumentalisation of Street Art culture that Muralism has become. This year, Nuart rises to these challenges, initiating new principles for collaboration whilst exploring alternative methods of organising that will hopefully allow the festival, and street art culture in general, to become adventurous again.”
Nuart Festival will take place between September 6th and September 9th, 2018. The festival’s indoor exhibition will take place at Skur 2, a purpose-built art gallery between September 9th and September 30th, 2018.
Tou Scene Centre for Contemporary Arts, a former 19th-century brewery and multidisciplinary arts venue, will host the Nuart Plus International Street Art conference and public opening of the festival on Saturday, September 8th at 1 pm.
Participant artists
AFK (NO), Alice Pasquini (IT), Carrie Reichardt (UK), Conzo & Glöbel (UK), Elki (UK), Ememem (FR), Ener Konings (NO), Fintan Magee (AU), Helen Bur (UK), Jan Vormann (FR), Jazoo Yang (KR), Máret Ánne Sara (NO), Martin Whatson (NO), Milu Correch (AR), Miss.Printed (NO), Murmure (FR), Nafir (IR), Nimi & RH74 (NO), Nina Ghafari (IR/NO), Nipper (UK/NO), Octavi Serra (ES), Said Dokins (MX), Skurk (NO), Snik (UK), Tref (NO) and Vlady (IT).
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Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
