The April event will explore how words and language work as public art.
Street art festivals usually work with murals and images. Next April, Nuart Aberdeen is doing something different: the entire event will focus on text and poetry-based work. This is a world first for a street art festival.
The theme is “Poetry Is In The Streets”, a nod to the French slogan “la poésie est dans la rue”. From 23–26 April, internationally-recognised street artists will use Aberdeen’s walls as a canvas for large-scale text pieces and smaller interventions across the city centre.
How it works
The format stays similar to previous years: large-scale murals alongside more intimate pieces appearing across the city. The difference is that everything will have text or poetry at its core. Curator Martyn Reed points out that text scales up just as effectively as any image. “Text lends itself very well to scaling up, the message can be as large and colourful as any other mural,” he says.
Aberdeen already has some strong examples from previous festivals: Robert Montgomery’s mural at Jopps Lane and Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman’s piece on the former Atholl House at Wapping Street. Both show how text-based work can hold its own as public art.
The digital culture angle
Reed has been thinking about how we read text now. On social media, text increasingly functions as image. It gets posted as a jpeg, overlaid on photos, processed visually rather than just read. “I’ve also noticed a shift on social media and digital culture, where text is very much processed as ‘image’ these days,” he explains. “Rarely does an image appear without a text overlay and often, text alone is posted as image, as a jpeg. It’s an interesting shift that we thought worth exploring.”
The festival has been named one of the top six street art festivals globally, which makes sense given its willingness to experiment. A text-based edition opens up different possibilities for how artists work and what you encounter as you move through the city.
Streets as source material
Poetry gets treated as something academic, art as something for museums. Reed’s point is simpler: “Poetry Is In The Streets highlights that it’s in the ‘streets’ where the content for poetry and art lives. That you can see and experience and reflect on it as you go about your day to day.”
Aberdeen has hosted Nuart since 2017, building up a collection of work across the city centre. This year’s theme pushes the idea further: instead of just adding art to the streets, it draws attention to the language and life that poetry comes from in the first place.
