un-commissioned. 

Let’s start right there. If you’re reading my words online, it means you have access to a website that links you to over 50 compelling artworks installed around the world.  It also means you have a window on the aspirations of the Novo Collective, a platform that has made a habit of rethinking and reclaiming the role of the arts in cities and in public life.  What does it mean to be installed but to remain un-commissioned?

In this case, artists and curators are guided and guide each other, without the typical ideas of hierarchy between them, and no one following the usual parameters of public art commissioning models, much less the models of museum exhibition. The city becomes the exhibition space. That doesn’t mean that we will be asked to gather at an appointed time to witness the unveiling of a monumental public sculpture—public art as plop art.

It doesn’t mean that artworks intended for a white cube gallery temporarily and nervously relocate outside.  Rather, it means that artists are exploring, elevating, and playfully redirecting all spaces of their city, including and most especially the spaces un-noticed (or under-noticed) by city dwellers themselves.  It means that many of those city dwellers are encountering these works before finding them on this website, and long before reading my words online.  

They might be walking their usual route to work and unexpectedly being encouraged to walk a different one. They might be at a bus stop, a train stop, a coffee shop and find themselves wondering if that sign has always been there, if that light has always shone that brightly, if people have always congregated here in the way they are now.  Indeed, they might find themselves wondering, and filled with wonder, about any number of colors, textures, structures, bodies, and behaviors that they had never noticed before. 

The exquisite power of the un in uncommissioned lies precisely in the unexpected, in the subtlety of the invitation that you didn’t know was coming. This is the power of art that you don’t attend but that you stumble upon.  Yes, You Were Here. 

The power of the un lies in this stumbling, but its power comes from other places, too. Indeed, it comes from many, many places, a global network of places linked in a transnational “playground of the invisible.” Squint and you see the un playing with the idea of the United Nations. Artists are activating sites across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Africa. To play with the United Nations is to question its bureaucratic form—and Bureaucratic Fantasy – but also to remind us of its social value, especially at a time when transnational association is being undermined by nationalist disassociation. 

At the fantastical bureau fashioned by Novo’s collaborators, artists focus locally while connecting globally.  Artists born in many nations, based in many more, are self-authorizing; though there are some splendid curators, the exhibition’s non-hierarchical ethos almost blurs the line between the traditional roles of artists and curators. They occupy space in a way that alters our perceptual habits. The city is not simply their canvas but their material; meanwhile, the city’s inhabitants are not simply spectators but unexpected participants. 

And in this UN, artists are not isolated but supported, buoyed by the local places they inhabit and by an international partnership where values, hopes, and commitments to Soft Resistance are shared.  These artists remind the actual United Nations that “soft power” is real power. 

If you’re reading online, then you also have access to systems that sort these works by location, by medium, and by threads and themes.  The sorting is a reminder that these works sit within longer genealogies of artistic practice and a wider association of social movements.  As you search, sort, and linger, you’ll find the same artwork mobilizing more than one Medium. Indeed, most all these works blur genres and are radically un-medium-specific.  

The practice of urban arts engagement has a long and venerable history, and a strategically eccentric one. Earlier in the 20th century, artists associated with the Situationist International developed an alternative “psychogeography” of their cities, practicing the “derive" and “détournement” as an alternative way of perambulating through a city and defamiliarizing habituated behaviors inside it. They committed to the Absurd as Method, a rigorous eccentricity that jostled city dwellers into experience city life anew.  

In that same century, more artists were propelled by a Conceptual commitment to the Idea in art and the Process of art, jumping out of the frame, off the pedestal, and away from the gallery walls to orchestrate durational, spatial, and embodied events. Most all these moves were inspired by social movements of their time, those that questioned the privatization of public life, those outraged by war, those that propelled the rights of people of color and the Feminist Body Politic.  

The practice of urban arts has a long and layered history, one that is both serious and strategically eccentric. In the early 20th century, the Situationist International proposed a new way of mapping and moving through cities: psychogeography. They invented tactics like the dérive (drifting through the city without a fixed destination) and détournement (repurposing signs and images) to disrupt familiar routines and reveal overlooked layers of urban life. Their method embraced the Absurd as Method—a a tool of serious play to transformed everyday experience into something unfamiliar and alive.

Later in that same century, artists committed to Conceptualism expanded the spatial, durational, and embodied dimensions of art.  These moves were never just formal experiments. They were animated by the social movements of their timethe anti-war movement, struggles for racial justice, and struggles on behalf of the Feminist Body Politic.

You will find these histories re-activated in the Mediums and Threads of the Novo Collective, albeit in ways differently urgent for our time. Many of these projects attend rigorously to the politics of (Dis)placement, especially as it inflects Indigenous Life and the experience of migration, “after” colonization and in a contemporary context of backlash and deportation.  

Whether or not they are tagged as Environmental, Ecological, or Land Art, you will be struck by how many of these projects sound contemporary alarms about climate change, the health of cities, and the health of the planet. Sometimes, the Wild in Wild Systems is linked to the energy of a Re-Wilding movement in city life.  It is always linked to the energy of systemic reflection. 

In fact, all the projects UN-commissioned here have that energy.  Whether implicit or explicit, whether in performance or in poetry, whether delicate or bold, all alight upon their own version of an infrastructural aesthetic, a detournement that incorporates urban space as artistic material even as it uses the arts to reimagine urban space.  Continually reinventing the power of the UN, the Novo Collective offers a speculative model for what a “Playground of the Invisible” might be.