V2K opens his solo exhibition Trajectories at Kooperator Space. Until 7 May.
It is 2017, Belmont Street, Aberdeen, the night of a screening of Exit Through the Gift Shop at Belmont Cinema.
V2K is handing out Nuart flyers. He has missed the volunteer briefing, so he doesn’t know who runs the festival. Nuart started in Norway. He’s expecting “some Norwegian guy”.
Then Nuart founder Martyn Reed walks past him, eating appetisers from the Hub, stopping to say something to the volunteer coordinator, before heading into the cinema.
V2K watches him go. He doesn’t know who he’s looking at. He knows the feeling.
“The kind you only get from professional bus drivers,” he says, “when you board the bus and know you’re safe.”
He hadn’t felt it for years.
He had the man wrong, taking Reed for one of the drivers who shuttle artists round the city, but he had the feeling right.
Inside the cinema the film started, and Reed’s face came up on screen with the caption: founder and director, Nuart Festival.
“The driver of the bus that is Nuart,” V2K says.
He went home and came back the next year, and the year after. That was nine years ago.
The festival, he says, helped him find “unpolished gems” he didn’t know he had. He had plenty of material. What he lacked was trust.
Reed handed him some of that back. So did the rest of the Nuart crew. This year, Nuart has given him a wall.
It is up already. A long stretch of black, painted with a poem in white block capitals.
Some letters run backwards: the odd N, the odd V, a C.
“The gloomy streets of our souls,” it begins, “engraved in cities of each heart.”
“I’m super excited about this opportunity,” he says, “and enormously grateful to the People’s Republic of Nuart.”
For years, he jokes, he has been at the back of the bus shouting, “Are we there yet?”
Now, he says, “We’re almost there.”
He ends with love for the Nuart family, and a line that reads like an instruction: “Let’s write some poems on the streets.”
