Nuart Returns to Aberdeen with Line Up for 2024

Nuart Aberdeen is returning with another all star line up for June 2024. With the theme of ‘Living Heritage’ it is the 7th rendition of the street art festival which has proved hugely popular in the granite city.

Once again featuring a mix of national and international artists. They are representative of various aspects of urban art culture. Street artists, graffiti writers and muralists all joining to bring some of the World’s best urban art to Aberdeen.

Nuart Symposium

Supported by the Nuart Plus Symposium. The event combines the external art with a series of academic talks, activities and discussions. Critics, industry professionals, writers, bloggers, photographers and creatives all contributing with their unique takes on street art culture. There will also be a series of free walking tours hosted by Inspiring City.

Living Heritage aka Intangible Cultural Heritage

Festival Director Martyn Reed describes the theme of ‘Living Heritage’ as being “the parts of our shared past that live in the present”. Everyday rituals and practices, cultural expressions, shared memories, festivals, stories and celebrations. All the things that help to define who we are. “These don’t have to be as old as time” he says. “Intangible Cultural Heritage is a form of heritage that lives in the present. Where we often incorporate elements of older traditions and cultural expressions in our contemporary practices”.

Ephemeral

Thinking about some of the work already created in Aberdeen. Martyn connects the ephemeral nature of it with how this too could be regarded as ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’. The first large scale mural painted as part of the first festival in 2017 was demolished in 2022. That piece, created by Herakut on the old market, was for a time a centrepiece. It offered a transformative energy to the area around it. All this prior to it’s disappearing and the areas renewal.

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NUART 2024 ARTISTS

For the 2024 edition 11 different artists will create new artworks throughout the city of Aberdeen.

Addam Yekutieli aka Know Hope (Israel/Palestine)  @thisislimbo

Addam Yekutieli is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist. He deals with issues of cross cultural encounter, historical and personal narratives and memory. Yekutieli’s practice consists of mixed media artworks, installation, photography and interventions in public spaces. He has a focus on text and how text interacts with the environment it is placed in.

Bahia Shehab (Egypt)  @bahiashehab

Bahia Shehab is an artist and author based in Cairo. She is a Professor of Design and founder of the graphic design program at The American University. Here she developed a full design curriculum focused on the visual culture of the Arab world. She frequently lectures internationally on Arab visual culture and design education, peaceful protest, and Islamic cultural heritage. Her work is concerned with identity and preserving cultural heritage. Through investigating Islamic art history she reinterprets contemporary Arab politics, feminist discourse and social issues.

Case Maclaim (Germany)   @case_maclaim

Case, aka Andreas Chrzanowski, is a founding member of the renowned Ma’Claim Crew. He has been a photorealism pioneer for over two decades. Primarily using the medium of spray paint to embrace the power of movement through the universality of hands. “Power” and “movement” have individually played key roles in the backbone of his German roots. Inspiring him to communicate his strong messages of unity and power by overlaying hands. This involves not just the movement of the physical body. But also political movement. Generally being left without a particular context. One in which the viewer is left to visualise the remaining story and/or emotion.

CBloxx (UK)  @cbloxx_nomad

Cbloxx (Jay Gilleard) is an English muralist, painter and multidisciplinary artist from Yorkshire. One half of the internationally acclaimed ‘Nomad Clan’ they are also known for their solo practice. A practice which often focuses on connection and the honouring of local heritage. Also incorporating social issues within their work. These themes seep in and blend together based on their own personal experiences and collected observations whilst being on the road.

Hera (Germany/Pakistan)  @hera_herakut

HERA (Jasmin Siddiqui) is a Frankfurt-born German-Pakistani painter with roots in the graffiti and street art genre. She has been travelling the world since 2001. Painting large-scale murals, solo or as part of the duo HERAKUT.

HERA was part of “Artists for Human Rights“, the first ever street art exhibition inside the European Parliament in Brussels in December 2022. In 2023 she worked on several United Nations funded projects with the NGO “Streetart for Mankind“ promoting social change. This is in line with HERA ́s continuous efforts to utilise street art for humanitarian causes.

KMG (Scotland)  @kmgyeah

KMG is a Scottish based artist who has been making work on the street for over a decade. Her recent work explores themes of mythology, community and the history of our local landscapes. Using characters as a means to connect with viewers and to engaging them in dialogue. She uses these themes to question the connections of our environments to our heritage and cultural identity and how these translate to the current day.

Mahn Kloix (France)  @mahnkloix

Mahn Kloix grew up in a family of activists, motivated by the major combats of the social left. Despite the card-carrying activism hovering over his head, the young man himself would choose a path where there was no party, but just as much commitment: artistic creation. Based in Marseille since 2010, he makes the old historic city centre his departure point for exploring the “political and
militant” Mediterranean basin.

He is currently known for his ‘Small is Big’ project. Inspiring initially by young demonstrators in Istanbul. He set about sketching the protesters’ faces, and then paid tribute to them by displaying their portraits in the street. The uprisings of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Indignants
movement in Athens also provided raw material for the project that was then slowly taking shape.

Millo (Italy)  @_millo_ 

Francesco Camillo Giorgino also known as Millo. He paints large-scale murals that feature friendly inhabitants exploring their urban setting. He uses simple black and white lines with dashes of colour when necessary. He then incorporates elements of architecture into his multi-story paintings.

Molly Hankinson (UK)  @mollyhankinson.studio 

Molly Hankinson is a visual artist from London now living in Glasgow. She creates honest and unapologetic representations of people and communities through a feminist lens. She enjoys portraying people who are completely at ease with themselves in their own surroundings. Incorporating the aesthetics of bright and considered colour placement with use of continuous lines. She creates bold and subtly detailed inclusive celebrations, that transcend, or call into question societal expectations surrounding gendered expression. Her subjects are characterised in a powerful way, which she depicts through the highlighting of shared experiences. She works across a broad range of artistic practices, from large-scale mural work, to painting, printmaking, and hand-drawn and digital illustration.

Niels Shoe Meulman (Netherlands)  @nielsshoemeulman

Niels Shoe Meulman is a visual artist, known for his gestural paintings which reveal vivid traces of graffiti and calligraphy. He revolutionised the art of writing when he initiated the Calligraffiti movement, claiming “a word is an image and writing is painting”. Being a graffiti pioneer from Amsterdam, Shoe tagged along with New York counterparts like Dondi White, Rammellzee and Keith Haring in the 1980s. Equally influenced by abstract expressionist painters and pop artists, he gradually found a unique way to translate street attitude to galleries and museums. Experimenting within the traditional medium of paint-on-canvas, but also unafraid to venture into other domains like conceptual installations and poetry, Niels Shoe Meulman keeps pushing the limits of the global urban contemporary art movement.

Wasted Rita (Portugal)  @wastedrita

Portuguese visual artist Wasted Rita is a self-styled “natural born agent provocateur.” She likes to observe, reflect, write and draw, pouring forth little gems of mordant wisdom, reflecting an unconventional upbringing in a Catholic school to the sound of Black Flag. Her angst-ridden poetic invectives on contemporary life, popular culture, and human behaviour have been finding their way into exhibitions and art commissions in a growing number of countries around the world.

Nuart Aberdeen 2024 will take place on June 6th-9th. You can follow the event by heading to the festival website. You can also follow via instagram with the handles. @nuartaberdeen and @aberdeeninspired