Here’s part two of our FAME Festival mural coverage, thanks to Henrik Haven and his photos. Part one can be found here. In a two-part series, we’ve selected some of our favorite pieces from FAME 2012. For part two, we’ve got walls by Conor Harrington, Lucy McLauchlan, Cyop & Kaf, MOMO, Boris Hoppek and Bastardilla.
Continue reading “Murals from FAME Festival 2012, part two”
In my second post about Nuart 2012 (part one here) I’ve finally got some finished pieces to show. While Nuart is known for the outdoor work that they organized, the artists probably spend just as much time, some of them more, on the indoor installation component of the festival. This year, work was installed in a series of old beer halls at Tou Scene, a venue in Stavanger that Nuart has used a few times. These aren’t all the installations that Nuart had this year, but here we have the finished installations by Eine, Jordan Seiler, Saber, Ron English, Aakash Nihalani, How and Nosm, and Sickboy. Thanks to Ian Cox for all of the great photos coming out of Nuart.
Continue reading “Nuart 2012 part two: Indoors”
A note from RJ – This guest post is by my friend Shafiur Rahman, whose films I’ve posted about several times on Vandalog. Shafi is an interesting figure in the London street art community. Yes, he can be seen wandering around Shoreditch looking at work or at the gallery openings, but he isn’t just a street art fan boy. He is interested in street art, but his film company makes films about a wide range of social issues. On a few occasions, he’s been able to bring a bit of politics back into street art and muralism by involving street artists in his other film projects. What he writes about here is just one such instance.
In 2010 I started filming a film about apartheid in South Africa. After conducting several interviews, I realised I had interviewed – unwittingly – various members of the Picasso Club. These were activists who used to paint anti-apartheid slogans in the dead of night in the city of Johannesburg in the 1960s. Some of the members of the club are still alive and they have led very distinguished lives – everything from 26 years of imprisonment to holding high office in the post-apartheid government of Nelson Mandela.
These Picasso club guys gave me an idea. It dawned on me then that I could use street art meaningfully in my film. A kind of sloganeering too because I had in mind to paint giant portraits of those who had died in the struggle and who were now fading from memory. Fading both in terms of being easily recognised and in terms of the spirit they embodied: selfless struggle and sacrifice, I think is the phrase here. So the art would question the viewer – who is this you are looking at and why here. I had in mind to paint people who had died in the struggle and were intimately connected to the places where they would be painted. It could be where they worked or where they lived or where they were killed.
So Ben Slow painted Ruth First. She was a white Jewish woman, a communist party member and a dedicated fighter against apartheid. The apartheid regime killed her with a letter bomb. We painted her at a spot not far from a place called Kliptown. This was the place where the Freedom Charter was adopted by the many organisations fighting apartheid. Over the years the Freedom Charter became the central document outlining an egalitarian vision of South Africa. Ruth First helped draft that document. We painted her in a community which has experienced much violence and continues to do so. The building we chose was big enough to paint the 4m mural. Surrounding it are other smaller dwellings with no electricity or running water. They are simple one-roomed tin shacks. The legacy of apartheid is still evident in 2012. Sadly the values Ruth embraced and fought and died for are less evident in today’s South Africa. That is the general feeling. Picasso Club members despite their loyalty and polished diplomacy betrayed similar feelings in their interviews.
The people of Nomzamo park loved the mural. Some had a notion of who Ruth was. Most did not. One guy who knew of her kissed Ben’s hand and said he loved him for painting her.
Photos by Shafiur Rahman
This year’s edition of the Moniker Art Fair opens in Shoreditch this Thursday. This year, Moniker will be more focused than ever before on installations rather than traditional art fair gallery booths. Actually, the show will be entirely installations. Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman, Ludo, Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada, C215, Remi/Rough, Ben Slow and others will be there.
Moniker opens on Thursday from 7-9pm, and will be open Friday and Saturday 11-7pm and Sunday 11-5pm.
More info on the Facebook event page.
Photo courtesy of Moniker Projects
Bristol holds a special place in the UK’s graffiti culture. Distinct from other cities it’s laid back attitude and independent spirit has been in part responsible for producing a number of pioneering artists since the 1980’s such as 3D, Inkie (who now organises the huge See No Evil street art festival), Nick Walker, Sickboy, Mudwig and of course Banksy. Over the last two decades one collective who have been representing Bristol at graffiti jams across the world with their impressive and progressive work are the TCF crew. Which brings me to the main subject of the post – Acerone aka Luke Palmer, a key member of TCF, has his first London solo show this week. Although Bristol has a number of galleries that support street art and graffiti sometimes its necessary to make the trip to the capital to step things up a notch…
This is exactly what Luke has done for his upcoming Where is Iron John? show. For some years Acerone has been experimenting in combining photographic techniques with painting. This mixing of media comes together in atmospheric murals that feature the inner-city at night with bursts of light and canvases that are inspired by double-exposure and motion blur while he also works with photographic prints and installations.
Where is Iron John? is a new body of work which is inspired in part by the iconic Grimm Brothers ‘Der Eisenhans’ fairy tale. Luke uses his own photo shoots of London’s classical statues combined with painting to “explore representations of serenity and the complexity of modern masculinity and its links to the male of yesteryear”. It is certainly an interesting notion to look at the heroic statues that are fixtures of our historic cities against the fast pace world we live in and compare those effigies to our own complex lives and the pressures of the modern male. In subject matter and in innovative techniques this show looks set to be something out of the ordinary from Bristol’s extraordinary street art scene…
Last week, I was in Stavanger, Norway for this year’s Nuart Festival. It was a blast, but I’ve been really slow about posting about it. I was at Nuart as part of the Nuart Plus conference, the lecture and panel discussion side of Nuart. Some of the other speakers included Tristan Manco, Carlo McCormick, Ron English and Evan Pricco. Hopefully soon, the video from Nuart Plus will be online, but in the mean time, I’m going to have to focus on the main part of the festival: The art.
Nuart is one of my favorite mural festivals, along with Living Walls and FAME, because they have consistently and for many years brought together the street art community to improve a city otherwise would not have all that much street art or graffiti (there are a handful of local writers and and street artists who should not be discredited, but Nuart’s work certainly dominates the city). The argument can be made that the annual street art invasion might be insensitive to local residents, but I’m a big fan of turning cities into temporary playgrounds when art gets left behind.
In this first of probably 3-4 posts about this year’s Nuart, there are just images of the set up and the work in progress. While Nuart leaves Stavanger with great new murals and installations every year, one of the great things about Nuart (and many mural festivals) is what happens between the artists and the festival staff behind the scenes. Every evening, there were group dinners at Food Story, and usually some light drinking followed. In this way, Nuart ends up facilitating conversations and friendships that go beyond the festival and may carry over into future work.
There are two components to the art production side of Nuart: Indoor installations and outdoor installations (mostly, but not entirely, murals). This year’s Nuart artists were: The Wa, Aakash Nihilani, Eine, How and Nosm, Ron English, Mobstr, Niels “Shoe” Meulman, Saber, Dolk, Jordan Seiler, and Sickboy. A very solid line up with a few heavy hitters and a few talented but underrated guys.
The indoor installations were in the old beer halls of Tou Scene, a venue that Nuart has used a few times before. Tou Scene is a great space for Nuart’s installations, because the beer halls are basically these big beautiful archways like the arches that the London galleries Black Rat Projects and Arch 402 are in. The outdoor installations take place all across the city.
There was some amazing work made this year, with highlights being a murals by Ron English and Shoe, and the indoor installation by How and Nosm. Expect many more photos over the next week or two.
Continue reading “Nuart Festival 2012 – The setup”
Stencil pioneer Logan Hicks has a solo show opening this week at Opera Gallery‘s Paris location. The show opens on October 11th at 6:30pm, and runs through November 3rd.
As I mentioned back in July when Logan had a show in London, he’s been someone I admire as both an artist and a friend for many years, but with this show the Vandalog team got two more reasons to be especially excited: 1. One of the new pieces for this show is a portrait of Vandalog’s Caroline Caldwell. 2. That piece, along with portraits of Keith Schweitzer, Jordan Seiler and others is on anodized aluminum, which is my favorite kind of stencil-work from Logan. These pieces are basically solid pieces of aluminum that have been etched into chemically, if I half-remember the process correctly. Coincidentally, the first time one of Logan’s anodized aluminum pieces was shown was at Up Close and Personal, a show that Keith Schweitzer, Mike Glatzer and I curated.
Logan’s work really does need to be seen in person, so I highly recommend checking out this show in the flesh as soon as it’s open.
Photos courtesy of Logan Hicks and Opera Gallery
It was quite a delight coming upon MOMO at work this past week, as the last time — and only time — I”d seen him paint was back in 2008. Here is the finished piece:
And the entire block as it is shaping out:
I also loved MOMO’s work in Geometricks, wonderfully curated by Hellbent with BSA, over at Gallery Brooklyn.
Photos by Lenny Collado, Dani Mozeson and Lois Stavsky
The Frenchman Roti is the latest artist to paint for the Living Walls Concepts mural series. Here are a few photos of his wall.
Photos by Dustin Chambers
Here’s some stuff I missed this week while sitting under a giant stack of books and papers to read, mostly stuff I was supposed to read for school but avoided because I was at Nuart last weekend.
Photo by Colin Chazaud
