ANTI Festival Celebrated its 25-year History and the Future of Experimental Art

The festival events took place at the Väinölänniemi beach, the Market Square, the Kotkankallio civil defense shelter, the railway station, the lobby of the Kuopio Museum and in other public spaces in the Kuopio city centre. We reached an audience of around 5,000, and the festival’s participants came from all over Finland as well as from 12 different countries abroad.

In addition to the programme themed around the 25th anniversary celebrations, the festival featured three international performance works that explored queer-feminist futures and the impact of queer bodies on public spaces. British artist Sym Stellium performed their piece I’m a cow / you’re a b*tch with a cow’s heart, which attracted a great deal of attention and sparked much discussion. In the end of this ritualistic performance, the artist and the audiences gathered to pay their respects to the animal that many see only as a consumable.

For the Queer Autonomous Zone (Kuopio) project, by the Turkish artist Onur Tayranoğlu, we engaged in a year-long dialogue with queer people in Kuopio. At the main event of this multi-part work, the artistic team and festival audiences from Kuopio, across Finland and around the world explored together the boundaries between performance and reality, whilst declaring the city a Queer Autonomous Zone.

The festival week culminated in Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise, the performance by the US artist Keioui Keijaun Thomas on the Väinölänniemi beach. The piece sketched an oppressed Black trans life on the landscape, but ended on a note of peace and joy. The artist waded in the Lake Kallavesi and burrowed into the sand on its shore, yet the captivating performance transcended time and place. Thomas first performed in Kuopio in 2019, when she was a nominee for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. The Prize will next be awarded at the ANTI Festival 14–19 September 2027.