Aberdeen City Centre prepares for 1500ft paste-up in worldwide collaborative project!
Art can be humble while still making an impact; as much craft as high concept, while still grabbing attentions and changing minds. The more accessible the initial process of making art becomes, the more likely it is to reach a wider audience.
Looking past the widely-known terms of Street Art & Public Art, and further beyond familiar ideas of Graffiti, Muralism and Stencil Art, we wondered how many people would know they were passing by a ‘Wheat Paste’, a ‘Paste-Up’, a ‘Locative Collage’. The answer to that was ‘not enough’ – a whole world of often-overlooked art operating in a space that is uniquely liminal (which in this case we like to think of as somewhere between legal and criminal).
With that in mind, Nuart has secured 1500ft of space in Aberdeen City Centre to create what we hope will become the world’s largest paste-up wall, bringing three separate collections of art together:
• Nuart’s founder and creative director Martyn Reed, in partnership with fly- posting legends UNCLE, will bring a curated selection of Nuart artists to the wall, line up to be announced soon.
• Flyingleaps, the subversive counter-culture arts initiative founded in response to the Brexit referendum result, will celebrate its fifth anniversary with street poster art spanning its revolutionary archives, created by a global coalition of urban contemporary political artists.
• Nuart are now inviting subm issions from across the globe, in an ‘open call’ to artists, poets, witches and pirates to contribute to the spectacle, creating a truly collaborative concept and ignoring the borders that become more oppressive each year.
Click here to read more about the project in the blog.
Participating artists
Aida Wilde (UK)
Aida Wilde is an Iranian-born, London-based printmaker, visual artist & educator, whose diverse screen-printed installations and artworks question issues of gentrification, education, and equality. Wilde’s serigraphs can be found on city streets and in galleries across the world including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths, Vienna’s Fine Art Academy, Somerset House, and Saatchi Gallery.
Addam Yekutieli aka Know Hope (IS)
Over the past two decades, Addam Yekutieli, aka Know Hope, has developed a visual iconography and language to mirror real-life situations and document the notion of a collective human struggle. Yekutieli’s site-specific installations, murals and assemblages use ready-made materials, mixed-media pieces, photographs and text to explore issues such as cross-cultural encounters, borders, and trauma.
Bahia Shehab (EG)
Prof Bahia Shehab is an artist, author and Professor of Design at The American University in Cairo. Her work has received a number of international awards, including the BBC’s 100 Women’s List, a TED Senior Fellowship, a Prince Claus Award, and the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture. Bahia was active on the streets during the Arab Spring uprising, and maintains a presence alongside her international arts career.
Jeremy Deller (UK)
Jeremy Deller is one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists, having won the Turner Prize in 2004 and the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) in 2010. Deller is best known for his Battle of Orgreave (2001) – a re-enactment of the events which occurred during the UK miners’ strike in 1984 – and for 2016’s acclaimed We’re Here Because We’re Here.
Jeremy Geddes (NZ)
Jeremy Geddes is a photo-realistic painter born in New Zealand who, having studied painting in the early 90s, initially worked in video games as an art director. Geddes won the Spectrum Gold Award for his cover art for the comic, Doomed. In 2003, he returned to painting full-time and has since had his work published and exhibited around the world, finding particular acclaim for his existential Cosmonaut series.
Robert Montgomery (UK)
Born in 1972 in Chapelhall, Scotland and currently living and working in London, Robert Montgomery brings a poetic voice to the tradition of contemporary text art. Renowned for his large, public light installations, fire poems and distinctive black and white billboard artworks, his work engages with the urban world through his translucent poetry, a direct approach to universal themes such as power and love.
Sam Durant (USA)
Sam Durant is a critically-acclaimed multimedia artist whose works engage social, political, and cultural issues, using research-based methodology with an emphasis on social engagement. Durant’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta 13, the Yokohama Triennial, the Venice, Sydney, Busan, Liverpool, Panama, and Whitney Biennials.
Martyn Reed (Nuart)
Martyn Reed is a British artist, researcher, curator & producer based in Stavanger, Norway. He is the founder and artistic director of Numusic and Nuart Festivals and their related offshoots Nuart Gallery and Nuart Plus as well as Editor in Chief of the peer review Nuart Journal. Much of Reed’s work and the projects and platforms he devises are international collaborative events that revolve around promoting art as part of everyday life using counter cultural strategies, values and thinking.