nva is an environmental arts charity based in Glasgow. Founded by Angus Farquhar in 1992, the company has since built a powerful reputation through the delivery of temporary and permanent art works across Europe. nva’s mission is to encourage international, pioneering artists to 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. nva currently employs 10 core staff and partners, with up to 100 additional staff and contractors over each project period.

nva is an acronym of nacionale vitae activa, a Roman term denoting ‘active social citizenship’ – 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; and exploring how places shape, and are shaped by, their inhabitants.

nva has created some of the UK’s most critically acclaimed contemporary works, including presentations in gorges, on mountainsides, and other extraordinary and remote locations including: long term capital projects such as the multiple award winning Hidden Gardens sanctuary in Glasgow; medium sized repertoire projects like 'Pain' and 'The Gimmick' that can be restaged and taken to different venues; and 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’.

At the heart of this work is a commitment to continue good evironmental 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.

Visiting Arts has worked with nva several times. For information on Visiting Arts' funded project with Divya Bhatia please see this entry on culturebase.net.