Nuart Plus Street Art Conference
DAY 2: REWILDING THE CITY
11:00–17:00, free entry
Aberdeen Art Gallery, Cowdray Hall, Schoolhill, AB10 1JQ
Sign up for the event
On Day 2 of our Street Art Conference, Festival artist Jamie Reid will rewild and reconnect us to a shared and more ancient kinaesthesic bond with the natural world; bestselling author Stephen Ellcock will rewild our psychic landscape; and audiences will have the opportunity to meet some of Nuart Aberdeen’s festival artists. Throughout the day we will explore the ways that we could, in practice, rewild our cities (with Charlotte Pyatt).
11:00–11:10
Welcome and introduction
by Dr Susan Hansen (AU/UK)
11:10–11:50
The Power of the Ova: Jamie Reid’s Heligan project
Jamie Reid & John Marchant in conversation
Festival artist Jamie Reid joins gallerist John Marchant in conversation to discuss Jamie’s Heligan project. Reid is best known for his subversive genre-defining visual work with the Sex Pistols, but for the Heligan project, he worked with 11 rural acres to etch an immense geometric symbol into the land – creating a sensory experience alive with the buzz of the bees drawn by the sea of wildflowers he seeded within the design. Jamie Reid says of this monumental work that, “The OVA symbol represents rebirth and growth and healing and encompasses the points of the 8-fold year, the solstices and equinoxes.” This is landart that rewilds and reconnects us to a shared and more ancient kinaesthesic bond with the earth, nature and the passage of the seasons.
11:50–12:40
Signs and Wonders: The Cosmic Dance and Finding a Place in Space
Keynote Presentation by Stephen Ellcock
The Tate Modern refer to bestselling writer and curator Stephen Ellcock as an “itinerant image-scavenging art-fugitive.” Nuart Plus speaker Ellcock describes his ever-expanding, virtual museums on Facebook and Instagram as the “ultimate cabinet of curiosities.” Through his work, Ellcock rewilds our psychic landscape, via extraordinary collections of lost images that together create what the New Statesman calls, “a phantasmagorical national dreamscape full of strange insights and juxtapositions and bristling with dark magic.”
12:40–13:30 — BREAK
13:30–14:10
Live, Laugh, Lower Your Expectations
Presentation by Harriet Richardson
At the 2019 Youth for Climate strike, award winning artist and designer Harriet Richardson’s protest slogans went viral, leading to what she calls her “15 minutes of meme-fame.” Her slogans included “I don’t want to live on Mars with Elon Musk”, “I should be at work” and “I can’t swim”. A video of Harriet marching through the city with the sign “Leonardo DiCaprio’s Girlfriends Deserve a Future” (referencing DiCaprio’s reluctance to date women over 25) rapidly went viral on Twitter, attracting 2.5 million views. This foundational experience gave Harriet an insight into the impact of wordplay in well-executed art and design, a combination that she continues to develop via prints and posters that respond powerfully to local and global issues.
14:10–14:30
Artist Talk
Aida Wilde
Festival artist Aida Wilde also works with powerful slogans. Wilde’s installations have featured on city streets around the world and respond to issues including gentrification, education and equality. Her HASHTAG series with Brandalism in Paris was created in response to the COP21 Summit, and she participated in the global project Subvert The City, the world’s first coordinated international ad takeover. Aida has been an active artist within London’s Hackney Wick community for 14 years, where she creates works responsive to the dramatic changes in the area.
14:30-14:45 BREAK
14:45–15:25
Rewilding in Practice
Charlotte Pyatt, Bjørn Van Poucke, Arne Vilhelm Tellefsen, Tim Horrox, Adrian Burnham
This panel brings together a range of local, national and international cultural producers to discuss how we can collectively rewild our practice to create, scatter and plant seeds for social and environmental change across the city.
15:25–16:15
Meet the Artists Panel
On Saturday 10th June, the city’s first street art tours for the festival will culminate at Aberdeen’s Art Gallery, where Nuart Plus will feature a live panel with selected festival artists, offering audiences the unique opportunity to meet the artists behind the freshly created work on the walls of the granite city. Local, national and international artists joining us include KMG (SC), Snik (UK), Eloise Gillow (UK/ES) and Tamara Alves (PT).
Closing Party: F*ck Art, Let’s Dance
21:00–01:00. Doors open at 9, Vinyl DJ playing from 10 – 1
Spin, 10 Littlejohn St, Aberdeen AB10 1FG
Before Nuart, there was the now legendary electronic music festival – and big brother to Nuart – Numusic Festival. An annual festival of underground electronic music established in 2000, that over its 15 years of existence hosted many of the world’s leading acts and emerging names in global club culture. FALD Aberdeen edition will be a more downbeat affair than its usual hands in air mayhem, but still, a place to let your hair down on a Saturday night and join us on the dancefloor.
A 4 hour vinyl only set of classic deep house from FALD & Nuart founder DJ Martyn Reed and guests. Now more known for his stewardship of the world-renowned street art brand Nuart, FALD is something of a throwback to his earlier days as a DJ and founder of the legendary Numusic Festival, one of the world’s first festivals dedicated to providing a platform for electronic music, an event that challenged the idea that this burgeoning new subculture was simply drug fuelled weekend escapism responding to the pressures of modern life. Which it was, and hopefully still is, but like most things, scratch the surface, and you’ll find, much like “street art” is so much more.
