ANTI Live Art Prize Jury Statement 2025

ANTI Festival is urgent and essential in this moment, as it creates space to gather in real time, away from the individualised, algorhythmic streamlining that increasingly permeates our days. The live art encounter offers permission for connection and co-regulation in a world where increasing numbers of people are experiencing loneliness or a feeling of social dislocation. The ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art celebrates the worldwide community of non-conformist artists who spark curiosity and critical thinking, yet exist outside of the narrow boxes siloed in the mainstream contemporary art and performance world(s).

In a time when borders are increasingly being weaponised for state violence, artists are important in resisting the fallacy that what is must be; we must remember and create ways of living that support the web of life. While authoritarian regimes encourage us to strip away empathy, encounters across difference become essential to root into our inherent interdependence. We wish to uplift and thank all the other changemakers who are portals of hope, generating change in their communities in these times of unraveling: teachers, care workers, activists, indigenous wisdom keepers and so many others. As we acknowledge the changemakers in this world, our hearts are with the people of Palestine, undergoing a horrific genocide. May the Palestinian people be able to live with safety, dignity and belonging in their homelands. May the many calls for justice in this time be seen, felt and tended to.

Across the Live Art sector there are many people, including our short list, who have been actively entangled within social movements that are pivotal in creating meaningful change, including disability justice, indigenous revival and addressing social breakdown. Among them, mid- career artists engaged in ongoing culture change work are particularly in need of further support given the ongoing precarity that many of them face. As a result, it is important to have prizes such as The ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, that provide resources and opportunities to bolster their courage and ability to continue creating. In this moment where many governments are cutting funding to arts, culture, spaces that foster community connection and imagination, we must remember that artists are workers. If we value art and the many benefits it brings, we must ensure that artists can access the material conditions to be well rather than in survival mode. For artists who are feeling overwhelmed by the situation we find ourselves in, we invite you to continue tending to your practices or ceremonies in life-giving ways, whether these are seen or unseen by the public. In order to change material conditions, we advocate joining aligned unions and peer support communities – we sense these will be increasingly important mechanisms in the years to come.

All the artists shortlisted for this year’s ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art continuously embody and imagine ways to co-exist outside the norm. We are thankful for the opportunity to engage with their work, to encounter their brilliance and celebrate their achievements. We will now address each of them and their practices below:

Chiara Bersani – thank you for persistently transforming the live arts field by questioning how we look at the stage, what we consider to be a stage – and whom we look at it with. You showed us that the body is inherently political when situated in public space. Your fierce artistic and curatorial practice keeps enchanting public spaces while raising urgent questions: who do these spaces truly belong to? How is our gaze shaped, and what imaginaries does it reinforce? We have observed how at times you become a gentle unicorn, at others you choose to work with the figure of a zombie – always transforming the ways we look at reality, or what we tend to imagine the reality is.

Thank you for intertwining exceptionally beautiful artistic interventions with ongoing activism to disrupt ableism, while empowering disabled artists to thrive within the live art space. While creating spaces of belonging, you give us hope for worlds where tenderness, strength, rage and justice coexist.

SJ Norman – thank you for your decades of work holding ceremony, contributing to indigenous resurgence and engaging in advocacy. We know that your powerful work in the live art space is only a fraction of the offerings you make, rooted in kinship networks and the determination to create alternative realities beyond the Western imagination. Thank you for communing with the energy of the sacred trickster to create embodied experiences that disrupt norms, making viscerally visible the colonial violence that has harmed so many of our ancestors, and continues today. Bone Library is a breathtaking example of your skill in creating a container that plays with settler systems of categorisation yet re-patterns the original violence by reinscribing the Wiradjuri (wih-rah-joo-ree) language into bone, into matter, into existence. Thank you for continuing to create in ways that feel aligned for you. We hope that you continue to trust your intuition and creative life force; the world is richer for your presence.

Harold Offeh – thank you for your body of work across live art, interactive sculpture, public installation, visual art and performance. With it, you invite us to see the world anew, disrupting conventional thinking while guiding us towards embracing nuance, unexpected encounters with the other and noticing the overlooked commonalities we share. It is clear that your work is rooted in generous intentionality, critical thinking and playfulness, skillfully exploring complex topics such as belonging, home, the nation and race. The situating of your work inside of communities is a testament to both your expert facilitation and compassionate inquiry. Thank you for your multi-faceted and effervescent practice also being a longstanding and inspiring commitment to teaching in its most liberatory sense. You and your practice are creating systems and artistic methodologies for us to learn together, to grow together, and to be vulnerable together. To bear witness to your work is to be a student in the rarest and most remarkable classroom.

All the shortlisted artists are involved in brilliant processes of creativity and change making. We were and are humbled with the task of choosing a winner. We are pleased to announce that the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art for 2025 is awarded to Chiara Bersani.

We extend our deep gratitude to the incredible ANTI festival team. Thank you for your ongoing efforts to make this exceptional event happen and for your commitment to support non-conformist artists as well as the broader live art community. Thank you Elisa, Season, Suvi, Sohvi, Katja, Esa and everyone in the team for your care and for the amazing opportunity to participate in the festival this year.

Last but not least, for any live artists, cultural workers or kindred beings reading this statement, wherever you are in the world, we hope you’ll find continuous motivation from Chiara, Harold and SJ’s practices, and continue to resist the fallacy that what is, must be.