Street artists and muralists from across the World once again descended on Aberdeen for the 2023 Nuart Festival. 12 artists created eight new painted murals alongside four street works which primarily featuring paste up and poster art.It marked another successful return to Aberdeen for Nuart who were celebrating their sixth year of working with the city. As in previous years, the combination of permanent and transitionary artworks provided a real art feast for people to seek out and stumble upon.Returning to the Scottish city, Nuart Aberdeen 2023 will feature 13 artists who will paint their imaginative and engaged murals around the city centre and its surrounding areas. The list includes AIDA Wilde, Eloise Gillow, Escif, Jamie Reid, KMG, Manolo Mesa, Murmure, NeSpoon, SNIK, Stanley Donwood, Swoon, Tamara Alves, and Thiago Mazza.“Rewilding”. A topical theme that touches on many issues related to “Trespass and Transgression” which we’ve been researching this past year with friends and colleagues for Nuart Journal, but one which provokes different questions and responses as it sends us down different pathways and tributaries.Rewilding isn’t without its own issues of course – it’s not all meadows full of wildflowers and the freedom to roam. There’s also the question of the local industries and people that have for generations built their lives around the enclosing of “common” land – not unlike those “creative industries” that have grown exponentially around “art” and the “artist”. In taking a “birds eye” view of a future “rewilded” city, where the roots from the art on the streets are entwined around the granite columns of our illustrious art institutions, and the carefully curated and cultivated flowers of the institution are flooding through the double doors and out into the high-street, we attempt to provoke reflections on what a city where art is truly free, might look, sound, smell and feel like. What happens to those industries and “enclosures” when art becomes unshackled from its chains?In a culture of the permissioned and commissioned mural where the tag still runs wild and free, how do we harness the power of one without losing the vitality and exuberance of the other?It’s an interesting picture, and those are exactly what we live for – and what we’ll hopefully be contributing to the local environment come June. We hope you’ll join us in exploring some of these new works and themes.‘To be honest, it will be some time before I’ve processed everything about Nuart 2023, in a lot of respect, when a Nuart “ends” , it’s very much the beginning for me. So I’ll let it settle, pick up the bills, enjoy the imagery and memories and hopefully come away with a sense of fulfillment. In saying that, I think that anyone involved in previous editions, would attest that there was something quite magical about this year. It really felt like we were a community of like-minded souls, that we caught and channeled something quite ancient and genuine and authentically human. Perhaps it was the rewilding theme, this yearning for something more than what the current system offers and how we’re forced to navigate it in order to put food on the table. I hope we managed to show some alternatives or triggered some thoughts around what this culture genuinely has to offer away from the glitz and the glamour, the novelty and the merch. Over the course of the production, I see deep and genuine friendships emerging, bonds forming that in some cases will last a lifetime. Apart from all the wonderful art, a genuinely interested public, the production and partners and all that goes into a Nuart edition, there are aspects of it that we’ll never know, the friendships and narratives and the seeds of ideas that are planted, new relationships to each other and to the world that are formed, this is the real story and value of what we all collectively create. – Martyn Reed, the director and curator of Nuart, on the evolution of Nuart Festival.Text from the Nuart Team More
