About a week ago we had the opportunity to travel to Stavanger in Norway for the 19th edition of the renowned Nuart Festival that, under the curation of his founder Martyn Reed, gives room to discussions on the current state of street art, a thematic curation that this year, has been titled “Brand New, You’re Retro.”
This year, the festival focused on the evocative intersection of memory and the city, and the role of art on the streets in unravelling and reworking not only the city’s collective memories, but also the cultures. New takes on old forms, graffiti merging with street art, classicism with vandalism, the advertising of subvertising, gentrification, rights to the city and in the case of one artist, rights to life itself.
Among the international artists invited to this highly anticipated event, we found a young multidisciplinary Catalonian artist called Jofré Oliveira, and whose work can be seen as both playful an experimental, but also socially conscious. This is the case of Oliveira’s outdoor mural, painted just a a couple of blocks from the Nuart offices at Tou Scene.
Titled ‘Beholders’ the mural revolves around the European refugee crisis. As described by the artist, the mural is “a timely look at the ongoing migrant crisis. On one side there is the passive position of the observer, on the other side there is the position of the artist. Both act as beholders of the critical situation. With sunken ships being paraded at Bienalles as art, this is a direct shot at both the art establishment and the media coverage of these tragic events.”
Although the idea for the mural was created previous his arrival in Stavanger, it seemed like a perfectly timed piece. At the time of his arrival, Norway was preparing for the elections under which right wing politician, Sylvi Listhaug had made a shocking comment on social media posting a image similar to the one Jofré used in his mural with a text that reads as follows: “Norway shall not accept immigrants. like and share”.
Jofré’s mural offers a possibility for introspection, to look within ourselves and the role we and the media play in relation to this issue and how we acquire a new understanding of how we perceive society confronting, putting our cultural differences aside and taking a maybe more human approach to this situation.
Jofre Oliveras: website | facebook | instagram
Nuart Festival: website | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Author: Fran
Founder and editor of Urbanite. Street Art lover who after the finishing her MA thesis on the Mexican and Norwegian muralist movement in the 1920-50s, developed a fascination for street art and graffiti that eventually led to collaborations with different art blogs, including the creation of this one.
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