There is something quite nice that the highly influential street art festival, Nuart, is now twice a year. It becomes like a summit of conversation amongst the urban art community, a gathering of artists, academics, writers, critics and organizers who work in and around street art, and when together, create new dialogues about one of the biggest movements in art over the last half-century. After we visited the original home of Nuart, Stavanger, back in September, Nuart Aberdeen is set to kick-off in April, and just began to announce the line-up. First off, back for his second-straight Nuart, is Dispatchwork artist, Jan Vormann.
From the festival:Jan Vormann’s global Dispatchwork project uses LEGO bricks to repair damaged walls. He describes the project as “a forum to further develop, piece by piece, a global game together”, one that encourages citizens to take back public space and leave their mark in a playful way. Some of the installations use a handful of toy bricks while others have used up to 30 kilos. Having started spontaneously patching-up surfaces in Bocchignano, Italy, Vormann has since employed the technique on walls in nearly 40 cities across Europe, Central America, Asia, and the United States. Following his participation in Nuart Festival 2018, Vormann headed to Italy to present a new Dispatchwork at the Venice Architecture Biennal. He says “Dispatchwork aims to ignite childhood memories of abstract shapes and vivid colors, towards a global collaboration of persons unknown to each other. A handful of used bricks is all you need to submit a contribution to the project, as long as you don’t mind when the structures slowly ‘dissolve’ or ‘disappear’ back into children’s toyboxes”.
DISPATCHWORK NUART from NUART on Vimeo.
Martyn Reed, Nuart director and curator says “ There’s something very basic about our need to build, to create our own worlds and to share them, this years theme, more on which later, explores this very foundational desire. Jan’s “Dispatchwork” series taps into this very basic human need in one of the most creative yet simple ways possible. The fact that he encourages others around the world to plagiarise the concept and join a growing international collaboration, rather than copyrighting and protecting the idea, says a lot about the ethos behind both the work and the man”
A founding member of the T10 Studios in Berlin, Jan Vormann is an artist, researcher and lecturer. He studied Visual Arts at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee, Germany, as well as Monumental Arts at the Stieglitz Academy of Fine Arts in St.Petersburg, Russia. In addition to interventions in public spaces around the world, Vormann has presented his work at international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale of Art (2011) and Architecture (2018), the Nuart Festival Stavanger (2018), Ars Electronica in Linz (2010), the Nuits Blanches in Paris (2014). Vormann's projects have been featured in global media outlets such as Le Monde, The New York Times Magazine, Deutsche Welle and Financial Times Deutschland.
Read our coverage of past Nuart Aberdeen's here.
