“There is some kind of paradoxes at work here, you want to preserve graffiti as something wild and not institutionalized, but at the same time see the creativity within it,” says Malcolm Jacobson, of Stockholm University’s Sociology Department, in the recap film for Nuart Festival’s 19th edition. “I think Nuart has been very good at keeping on that edge and balance.”
The famed festival, a titan in its field, conducted this year’s annual event September 5-8th at its home location of Stavanger, Norway. Nuart attracts world-class talent of all varieties, this year featuring work by 1UP Crew, Jad El Khoury, and Hyuro, to name just a few. The film recap also features a snippet from editor Evan Pricco on Juxtapoz Radio, praising that “99 out of 100 of the artists hit it right out of the park,” in a testament to the festival’s continued curatorial success.
Nuart’s website explains that this year’s event aimed to “once again bring a host of international artists to the city of Stavanger to help us make sense of the world we currently live in and how we can better navigate it.” This edition focused “on the evocative intersection of memory and the city, and the role of art on the streets in unravelling and reworking not only the city’s collective memories, but also the cultures.”
Their efforts to re-route the future began within. A statement provided by Nuart Founder and Curator Martyn Reed proclaims, “This year was a very special year for many reasons, we had a fresh team on both admin and production, and [we’re] proud to say we had an all female cast at the helm, the festival manager, head of production, lead admin, transport, education and workshops, street art tours and festival co-ordinator were all headed by woman. Which is probably why the production went so smoothly in spite of pushing everyone and everything to the limit.”
Progress proved a consistent theme. Paul Harfleet (UK), of the Pansy Project, responded to reports of homophobia throughout rural Norwegian schools by painting one delicate flower on the otherwise white, blank wall of a Stavanger school to symbolize the beauty of perseverance. Jad El Khoury, as we previously reported, brought his healing curtains from Beirut to adorn an abandoned building. Numerous murals focused on topical issues from climate change to migrant crises.
Just as their commitment to progress began with their own organizational culture, Nuart’s approach to the actual event is holistic, featuring a wide range of exhibitions from the murals themselves to a screening of the new Martha Cooper movie. In the recap film, one artist remarks that he’s constructed “toilet roll TNT” and others are shown painting skate decks.
Reed’s statement alludes to this variety, explaining, “To support the myriad street works and public events we were back with an indoor show at our old stomping ground Tou Scene, a space which offers up over 0.5 kilometer of wall space. The exhibition ‘Brand New, You’re Retro’ tackled topics as diverse as Paris 68 to Sea Level Rises 2100, in effect covering almost 150 years of art and activism.” Ultimately,he concludes, “There’s far too much content to show and people to thank.”
‘Brand New, You’re Retro’ is best encapsulated in a recent, part-documentary, part-art house film released recently on Nuarts website. This work of art in its own right, titled, “The Tunnels,” depicts their ambitious street art exhibition “that took place at the former brewery tunnels (now Tou Scene Centre for Contemporary Arts) as a part of the Nuart Festival 2019.”
The exhibition “takes its cue from a 1995 track by Bristol artist and producer Tricky,” and “plays host to eleven visiting artists representing a variety of practices (such as independent public art, street art, muralism, public intervention, subvertising, graffiti etc.) with a common background – a movement that was based on DIY approach, experimentation, cultural appropriation, creativity with the focus on the streets.”
‘Brand New, You’re Retro’ embodies everything that Nuart stands for – its commitment to perpetually pushing boundaries, challenging our engrained notions of ‘art,’ and focusing on an immense breadth of polarizing issues rather than zeroing in on one stale theme. The exhibition, and the film that accompanies it, show what the Nuart team is capable of, and each successive year of this festival will continue to reward viewers with their inquisitive, hard-driving work as an organization that empowers artists to forge new frontiers, above ground, below, and everywhere else.
