When I received the press release of Nuart Lockdown Edition, I was enthusiastic about the new format they came up with: maintaining a dialogue with the city, on the actual streets of Aberdeen (Scotland), through a poster campaign by the same artists who were announced to take part to the 4th edition of the international street art festival.
Amsterdam is unlike any other city for the Iranian activist-artist brothers Icy & Sot.
Amsterdam is where they had their first solo exhibition abroad in 2011, taking their first step into the international art scene. It was an internationally acclaimed first step at that, which eventually let them to escape the persecution and censorship they experienced in their home country.
The Crystal Ship 2018 > “The Crystal Ship is being filled”
“It’s nice to see a familiar face,” I said as I hugged Wasp Elder. It was my first time at The Crystal Ship street art festival in Oostende: I didn’t know anyone, I was unfamiliar with the city, and given my notorious social awkwardness, I was feeling a bit lost. All I had with me was a map I got from the Visit Oostende tourist office, which quickly became soaked under the Belgian rain.
Everybody seems to think that street art in Berlin is dead and undoubtedly the city isn’t anymore the ultimate destination for graffiti writers and all kinds of artists.
However, Berlin is home to two of the most popular graffiti crews worldwide (1UP and Berlin Kidz), a quirky Museum of Stickers and the art-gallery-turned-street-art-museum Urban Nation Berlin.
Urban Nation is responsible for the majority of urban art in the city, so our Berlin street art tour couldn’t start anywhere else than from their HQs on Bulowstrasse.
[UPDATE 2018: At last, I visited Urban Nation, read more below!]
As one more year passed by, I found myself thinking about my happiest moments from 2016 and –undoubtedly- attending the legendary Nuart street art festival in Stavanger (Norway) was one of them. Apart from a couple of interviews (with Axel Void and Henrik Uldalen), I still haven’t told you anything about that amazing experience, although you might have seen my round-up of outdoor and indoor murals and my recap of Nuart Plus academic conferences on I Support Street Art, the website I was representing at the festival. So I guess it’s about time I shared what my favourite walls in Stavanger are, not just from last year’s edition of this independent festival, but since its very beginning back in 2001, when Martyn Reed founded one of the pioneering events dedicated to everything urban and public art, which –since then- has been breaking new ground in the street art scene worldwide.