About Us
NVA is an environmental arts charity based in Glasgow. Founded by Angus Farquhar in 1992, the company has built a powerful reputation through the delivery of temporary and permanent artworks across Europe. NVA’s mission is to encourage international, pioneering artists to collectively produce highly complex and ambitious site-specific events, festivals and interventions. The company works across all media, promoting strong cross-cultural community work within technologically ground-breaking initiatives. With a small constant core staff we employ up to 100 additional staff and contractors over each project period.
NVA is an acronym of nacionale vitae activa, a Roman term denoting ‘the right to influence public affairs’ - a core value of the organisation. The vision has always been to transform natural landscapes and urban settings as a basis to change the way people see their environment. It takes what is ‘there’ as a starting point for uncovering underlying realities about time, politics, geology, history, culture, and belief. Exploring how places shape, and are shaped by, their inhabitants.
NVA has created some of the UK’s most critically acclaimed contemporary art works and performances, including presentations in gorges, on mountainsides, and other extraordinary and remote locations
PROJECTS: NVA develops long term capital projects, such as the multiple award winning Hidden Gardens sanctuary in Glasgow.
PRODUCTIONS: NVA produce medium sized repertoire projects, like Pain and The Gimmick, that can be restaged and taken to different venues.
ARTWORKS: NVA create one-off artworks and events that have long development periods with rapid growth and contraction around the production, such as ‘The Path’ and ‘The Storr, unfolding landscape’.
EVENTS: NVA curate urban visual art festivals which open up cityscapes to the public. Light Festivals such as Radiance Glasgow 05 and GLOW NewcastleGateshead 06, illuminate iconic buildings and showcase some of the best visual art light works by a wide variety of artists both national and international.
At the heart of this work is a commitment to continue good environmental practice in minimising impact and pollution to such an extent, that the company has redesigned the lighting technologies it uses, to significantly reduce power emissions and the reliance on fossil fuels in sensitive locations. NVA’s works are mostly ‘experienced’ dynamically at night and are often the culmination of extensive engagement with and the participation of the communities in which they take place.