As dusk settled over Aberdeen, the Bon Accord Baths slowly disappeared into shadow. The vast Art Deco swimming complex, empty for decades, still carried the cold acoustics of another era. From the viewing gallery, visitors looked down into the drained pool where a choir stood motionless beneath a suspended field of light. Then the voices began.

At the deep end of the baths, Robert Montgomery’s Even After All This Time the Sun Never Says to the Earth “You Owe Me” emerged as a temporary activation of collective emotion. The illuminated text stretched across the empty basin, its glow reflecting against the white tiles below and briefly returning light to a building deeply woven into the city’s collective memory. Once a place of childhood routines, swimming lessons and public gathering, the baths now stood suspended between absence and reactivation.

As daylight slowly disappeared outside, the installation shifted with it. The changing light transformed the work in real time, moving gradually from architectural intervention to something more intimate and spectral. By the end of the evening, Montgomery’s text had become the room’s primary source of illumination.

The opening night of Nuart Aberdeen 2026 unfolded slowly, almost ceremonially. Five local choirs performed from within the drained pool while audiences remained seated above, suspended between spectatorship and participation. The atmosphere shifted constantly throughout the evening: contemplative, mournful, intimate, monumental. Each performance altered the emotional texture of the space, while the poem itself seemed to change through repetition, its meaning subtly reshaped each time audiences returned to the glowing text.

Created in collaboration with Nuart Aberdeen founder Martyn Reed, the installation established the tone of this year’s festival immediately. Centred around the theme “Poetry in the Streets”, Nuart Aberdeen 2026 opened not through spectacle in the conventional sense, but through language, silence and the emotional experience of encountering a familiar civic space transformed into something temporarily sacred.

Installed inside the abandoned Bon Accord Baths, Montgomery’s work occupied the deep end of the empty pool with an 11-metre illuminated text structure assembled over the course of five days. Suspended against the stark geometry of the tiled basin, the glowing lines of poetry contrasted with the building’s fading grandeur and institutional austerity.

Montgomery described the installation as something “rising from the deep”, an image inseparable from the emptied swimming pool surrounding it.

It was almost like something rising from the deep. Rising from the deep wisdom of the Earth into something luminous. You can see the piece there in the pool, emerging upward.

– Robert Montgomery

This work is eleven metres wide. It’s the biggest light piece I’ve ever made, almost double the scale of my usual works. I wanted to create something monumental that made a positive statement about migration, about migrants, and about what migration brings to countries. About the importance of exchange between cultures, and the need to celebrate that.” 

The installation’s physical setting was inseparable from its emotional effect. A place originally built for movement, noise and public gathering had become still, hollow and echoing. The illuminated text behaved almost architecturally, cutting through the vast emptiness of the pool while briefly restoring a sense of presence to the abandoned space. The reflective white tiles scattered its warm light unevenly across the floor, amplifying both the scale of the work and the atmosphere of absence surrounding it.

The choir performances transformed the installation further. Human voices filled the enormous acoustic chamber while the illuminated poem hovered above the drained pool almost like a temporary public monument. The result was immersive without relying on spectacle or sensory overload. Instead, the opening unfolded slowly, allowing audiences to linger inside the text and return repeatedly to its words as the atmosphere and light shifted throughout the evening.

The words used in the installation draw inspiration from a line associated with the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez Shirazi. Rather than simply quoting the original text, Montgomery expands upon it, transforming its central metaphor into a contemporary reflection on migration, hospitality and collective responsibility.

I thought it might be a good moment to celebrate Iranian poetry and culture, and to celebrate Persian civilisation instead of destroying it. So I went back to the work of Hafez Shirazi, the 14th-century Persian poet. He wrote this incredibly wise poetry that still somehow feels modern, almost aphoristic, a bit like Khalil Gibran. The opening line of the piece, ‘Even after all this time the sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that,’ comes directly from Hafez. That’s where the original poem ends. I gave myself the task of continuing it. So I added: ‘Look what happens with a love like that, a whole world blooms. It’s the love they are forgetting.’ And by ‘they’, I mean Trump, Reform, anti-immigrant politics. ‘It’s the love the sun gives down to the Earth to be shared with every traveller, every migrant. Do not let them forget the love.

– Robert Montgomery

In a political climate where migrants are frequently framed through suspicion and fear, the work operates as a clear counter-narrative, reframing movement not as threat but as a shared human condition. The work avoids the cold rhetoric that often surrounds public discussions of migration, its language remains poetic, resisting both slogan and manifesto.

Montgomery has long used the visual language of advertising infrastructure, borrowing illuminated signs, billboards and public text formats to insert poetry into urban environments. Born in Scotland and later based in London, he first developed his “visual poems” through billboard interventions in the early 2000s, appropriating the visual grammar of advertising in order to interrupt it.

By placing poetry inside spaces normally dominated by commerce and instruction, his works create brief moments of reflection within the accelerated rhythm of urban life. Montgomery’s texts ask audiences to pause, read and emotionally reorient themselves within the city. Underlying this process is also a broader critique of the forms of language that increasingly dominate contemporary public life.

The dominant forms of public speech today are the language of news media and the language of advertising. Those languages dominate our cities and, increasingly, dominate digital space and even our inner lives in deeply invasive ways. Advertising speaks to us primarily as consumers, often using fear or paranoia to sell us things. News media speaks to us as demographics, voters, constituencies. But neither really speaks to our hearts, or to our sensitivity, empathy, grief, wonder or longing. In the past, religion often provided a language for those emotional and spiritual experiences. Many people no longer have that kind of language available to them. For me, poetry became that space instead. Poetry allows us to reconcile the child within ourselves with the exterior world. I think that is part of poetry’s essential therapeutic power.

– Robert Montgomery

As the opening act of Nuart Aberdeen 2026, Montgomery’s installation established the tone of this year’s theme, “Poetry in the Streets”, demonstrating how language can reshape the emotional experience of public space.

The choice of Bon Accord Baths was significant: the abandoned swimming complex exists as both architectural landmark and unresolved civic memory within Aberdeen. By reactivating the site through poetry, music and collective gathering, Nuart temporarily returned the building to public life.

There is also a longer continuity within Montgomery’s practice of working inside abandoned civic structures and former swimming pools, spaces often suspended between memory, loss and redevelopment.

I’ve worked in abandoned swimming pools before. People tend to bring me in for that now. It’s almost become its own genre. The first one I did was in 2012 in Berlin, at Stadtbad Wedding. They invited me there to mark the end of an era in Berlin. It was a smaller pool installation that read: ‘All palaces are temporary palaces.’ The piece became a kind of commemoration for the end of Berlin’s artist squat culture. The building had originally been an artist squat before turning into affordable studios and music venues around the old swimming pools. When they invited me, they were hosting the final party before the site was redeveloped into something commercial, a Lidl or something similar. So the work became both a celebration and an elegy for the end of a certain kind of freedom for artists in Berlin.

– Robert Montgomery

The artist later revisited the same text for a museum commission in New York State, this time rendered in gold in a way that deliberately echoed the visual language of wealth, power and Trump-era architecture. The phrase remained identical, All palaces are temporary palaces, yet the surrounding context fundamentally altered its resonance. 

That sensitivity to place remains central within Even After All This Time the Sun Never Says to the Earth “You Owe Me”. Inside Bon Accord Baths, the architecture does not simply frame the installation, but actively shapes its emotional resonance. The work becomes inseparable from the atmosphere of the abandoned pool itself, from its silence, scale and collective memory.

The most compelling moments occurred not while reading the poem itself, but in the pauses surrounding it: the silence between choral performances, the reflections across the tiled floor, the darkness slowly overtaking the building as daylight disappeared. In those moments, the installation became inseparable from the experience of being physically present within the baths.

There is also a continuity within Montgomery’s relationship to Nuart Aberdeen itself. His work first appeared during the festival’s inaugural 2017 edition with a permanent text piece on Jopp Lane that remains in place today, introducing many residents to the idea of poetry functioning directly within the urban landscape. This year, a second mural was added on Thistle Lane, featuring a poem written by his wife, Greta Bellamacina.

Montgomery’s work ultimately proposes another function for public language. In cities saturated with instructions, advertisements, warnings and commercial messaging, his texts interrupt the visual noise with something slower and more reflective. They ask audiences not simply to consume information, but to pause within it.

Most people are kind. The reality of our societies is that the vast majority of people want to help each other, share space and live in communities built around warmth, care and generosity. But public discourse is often dominated by much louder voices driven by fear, suspicion and division. Those voices make headlines. That’s why I think we need more billboards and public signs that express love, kindness and welcome instead.

– Robert Montgomery

For one week, Aberdeen’s Bon Accord Baths became a gathering space once again. The installation did not erase the building’s history or romanticise its decay. Instead, it temporarily returned sound, light and collective presence to a place defined for years by silence and absence.

Even temporary transformations can leave lasting traces. That may be the installation’s most enduring gesture. Not simply the poem itself, but the reminder that public space can still accommodate empathy, reflection and shared experience without surrendering entirely to spectacle, commerce or noise.

Nuart Aberdeen 2026

Outside the Bon Accord Baths, Nuart Aberdeen 2026 unfolded across the streets of the city through the contribution of twelve more artists, each exploring the festival’s theme, Poetry is in the Streets, through radically different approaches to language, text and public space. 

Rather than treating poetry as something confined to books or institutions, the festival repeatedly brought language back into the urban environment, transforming walls, signs and overlooked corners of Aberdeen into spaces of interruption, reflection and slower forms of attention.

Dr. D approached poetry as disruption, using altered road signs and a mural reading “VERIFY YOU ARE HUMAN” to interrupt the automated logic of both digital and urban communication. Alisa Oleva’s poetic walks revealed how public language is normally dominated by commands, advertisements and instructions, reframing poetry as a temporary suspension of utility within the city.

Aberdeen-based artist V2K continued his long-term practice of large-scale poetic text murals, integrating language directly into the city’s architectural and emotional landscape, while The Writing Is On The Wall used an ink gun to inscribe intimate poems onto urban surfaces, almost as if tattooing the city itself.

Elsewhere, artists such as Remi Rough, James Klinge and Ciáran Glöbel explored the unstable boundary between reading and looking.

Rough’s geometric abstraction retained the rhythm and memory of graffiti writing, Klinge transformed Wu-Tang Clan lyrics into circular calligraffiti mandalas, and Glöbel’s fragmented hand-painted signs shifted typography away from information towards atmosphere and association.

Ed Hicks approached language through fragmentation and accumulation, scattering poetic phrases across one of his dramatic painted landscapes, while simultaneously critiquing the repetitive formulas of contemporary mural culture in a second ironic text-based mural.

Questions of local memory emerged strongly in the works of Aberdeen-born artist KMG, whose mural and wooden panels referenced local poetry and the songs historically sung by the women selling fish in Aberdeen, reconnecting the festival’s contemporary interventions to older oral traditions already embedded within the city.

Finally, artists such as Molly Hankinson, The Rebel Bear and Trackie McLeod introduced more intimate and emotional registers into the streets. Hankinson dispersed Adrienne Rich’s poetry across shifting graphic forms.

The Rebel Bear balanced tenderness and catastrophe through subtle urban interventions, and McLeod used humour, slang and tabloid aesthetics to expose the social tensions embedded within everyday language.

Taken together, the festival proposed an alternative to the spectacle-driven logic that increasingly shapes both commercial public space and contemporary muralism, privileging instead forms of language that resist instant consumption and ask the city to be read rather than simply looked at.