This April’s festival takes a text-based turn, scattering smaller works across the city centre.
For eight years, Nuart Aberdeen has been painting the city in large-scale colour. This April, it’s doing something different.
Curator Martyn Reed is billing the 2025 edition as the world’s first poetry and text-based street art festival. Whether that claim holds up to scrutiny is hard to say, but the shift in approach is real. Instead of building-sized murals, the focus moves to smaller, human-scale pieces dotted throughout the city centre.
Reed has been behind every Nuart Aberdeen since it launched in 2017. He also founded the original Nuart in Stavanger back in 2001. This year’s theme, Poetry Is In The Streets, is giving him trouble in the best way.
“Words have a different power and this type of work perhaps demands a little more thought,” he says. “Which is something of a challenge when you just have a few seconds to capture the attention of a busy public.”
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Words to stop you in your stride
Street art usually works fast. A mural grabs you whether you want it to or not. Text asks you to stop and read, which is a bigger ask when you’re on your way somewhere. Reed is honest about the difficulty.
He’s been scouting locations across the city centre, but the process looks different this time. Rather than hunting for one dramatic blank wall, he’s after lots of smaller spots. The idea is that you’ll stumble across these pieces as you move through Aberdeen, rather than making a pilgrimage to a single landmark.
A push-back against AI art
Reed also brought up a recent proposal for an AI-generated mural in Glasgow that drew criticism online. “Having recently seen the proposal for an awful AI-generated mural in Glasgow, of which we’re no doubt going to be seeing a lot more of, I’d say we’re on the right track by trying something new, Aberdeen style.”
It’s an interesting position to stake out. As AI-generated imagery starts creeping into public spaces, Nuart Aberdeen is heading towards something handmade and deliberately slower.
Back to the roots
What the poetry works will actually look like is still taking shape. Reed's comments lean more towards philosophy than specifics, which makes sense for a format that's harder to describe than a painted mural. In some ways, though, text-based work is closer to graffiti's roots than the large-scale pictorial murals that have become the norm. It'll be interesting to see how it lands when you're walking past it on Union Street.
Reed frames this edition as building on what’s already here rather than imposing something new. “This year is focussed more on what we already have than what we don’t,” he says. “Something that’s easy to forget in our day to day.”
Nuart Aberdeen runs April 23–24, with works appearing across the city centre. As always, it's free. You can find more at 2026.nuartaberdeen.co.uk.
