Nuart Plus begins on Wednesday 22 April with a major new Robert Montgomery installation in the striking Art Deco setting of Bon Accord Baths, setting the tone for a festival shaped by poetry, politics and public space.

 

 

Wednesday 22 April

 

Even After All This Time the Sun Never Says to the Earth “You Owe Me”

 

Nuart Aberdeen 2026 opens on Wednesday 22 April with Even After All This Time the Sun Never Says to the Earth “You Owe Me”, a new installation by Robert Montgomery created in collaboration with Nuart curator Martyn Reed.

 

Staged inside the atmospheric, long-abandoned Bon Accord Baths, the work transforms one of Aberdeen’s most distinctive spaces into the site of a poetic public encounter.

 

 

The 11-metre installation acts as an opening statement for this year’s festival.

 

It brings together the emotional charge of Montgomery’s text-based practice with a setting that already carries its own powerful sense of memory, loss and civic possibility.

 

The result is a work that functions both as an artwork and as an invitation: to pause, to reflect, and to think about empathy in a time when public discourse is often stripped of tenderness.

 

 

Born in Scotland and based in London, Montgomery has built an international reputation through billboard poems, light works and fire poems that bring art and poetry into the public sphere.

 

His practice has long pushed language beyond the page and into the city, reclaiming formats usually associated with commerce and spectacle and turning them toward lyricism, melancholy and protest.

 

 

Opening night: 20:00-22:00 | Wednesday 22 April

 

Open daily: Thursday 23-Sunday 26 April | 12:00-18:00

 

Admission is free.