Curatorial statement

This is the 25th edition of the ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival Kuopio, Finland. The first ever ANTI Festival was organised in 2002. From the very beginning, participating in the ANTI Festival has been an experience that revolutionises one’s thinking and understanding of the arts and the world. (The previous sentence is based on direct audience response.) The anniversary programme explores alternative ways of seeing and presenting, and highlights perspectives on the festival’s history, the present, and the future. 

In addition to the anniversary year, the programming has been driven by the festival’s ongoing desire to make space for marginalised practices and to envision queer feminist futures in collaboration with artists. Three key, site-specific performance works at the festival all deconstruct, in their own ways, the illusions and assumptions of melancholy associated with queer lives, and build spaces for recovery, social transformation and hope.

Onur Tayranoǧlu (Turkey) conducted a survey and interviews among the queer people of the city for their project Queer Autonomous Zone (Kuopio). Dear queers of Kuopio, you may still sign up to participate in the project’s implementation phase. The September event borrows forms of national ceremonies and demonstrations and welcomes all queer people and their allies.

Julischka Stengele’s (Austria) performance, Offering Space create three different occasions to exist together, listen, and exchange in public spaces. Stengele writes on topics such as desire, pain, food, belonging, language, health, architecture, and the body.

The choreography of Come Hell or High Femmes: The Dolls Rise by Keioui Keijaun Thomas (United States) is based on queering landscapes, camouflage, and metamorphosis. Thomas reclaims what it means to be black in nature, forging new ways to exist in peace, joy, and healing in relation to the landscape. In Kuopio, the performance will take place on the shore of the Kallavesi lake on the festival’s closing night.

During the festival, an international network, dedicated to nurturing queer interdisciplinary performance practice, will gather in the city. The Future Kin network aims at developing strategies and follow-up projects to support marginalised art practices. The members of the network are, in addition to the ANTI Festival, Live Art Development Agency (United Kingdom), My Wild Flag (Sweden), Rosendahl Teater (Norway) and Warehouse9 (Denmark). 

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To celebrate the 25th anniversary, we have put together a diverse programme of artistic and discursive events. It includes, for example, an installation (empty space) and a typographic poster series by the festival’s long-term graphic designer, artist Tomi Leppänen (Finland). The starting point for Leppänen’s work has been the mission of the ANTI Festival. 

The history, present, and future of the ANTI Festival as well as its social and international impact and significance in the development of Finnish live art and performance and new genre public art are explored in a podcast series and discussion meetings marking the festival’s anniversary year. The discussions will feature artists from Kuopio, who have presented their work at the festival, this year’s participating artists, and some pioneers of live art and performance. The ANTI 25 Talks are co-curated and produced by curator and writer Heidi Backström. 

We will also revisit the venues and works of past ANTI Festivals, both to reflect on the past and to contemplate the present and look toward the future:

Kira O’Reilly’s (Ireland/Finland) presentation, Untitled Performance Lecture (a gift, redux) invites us back to her legendary performance, Untitled Action for a Bomb Shelter in Kuopio that was experienced at the ANTI Festival 25 years ago. The performance lecture will pull on the threads of the original performance and its connections to her work now.

The performance lecture, Life is temporary by Tuomas Laitinen deals with thoughts that arise when looking through the ANTI Festival’s archive. The lecture is part of a new collaborative project between the ANTI Festival and the Reality Research Center, titled The Collection of Vanishing Art, which reimagines the ways in which live art and performance is created, presented, and experienced in the context of public art. As part of the project, Laitinen is preparing a new public performance piece for next year.

Students from the Aalto University’s Department of Art and Media will carry out site-specific projects at the venues of the first-ever ANTI Festival. Kid’s Station by Sara Grotenfelt, Lotta Hildén and Tuisku Ojanperä (Finland) is an participatory intervention at the Kuopio Railway Station. The first ANTI Festival presented a work by Kristiina and Riikka  Korpela in the same location. stoneless by Katja Hänninen and Laura Jänicke invites you to join a communal artistic act where we leave our stones in the Sankaripuisto Park. The work takes inspiration from Nameless by Essi Kausalainen, a performance that took place in the same park at the ANTI Festival in 2002.

We will be celebrating the festival’s finale and its 25th anniversary to the tunes of riot pop artist Elsi Sloan (Finland) at the – also 25-year-old – restaurant Pannuhuone.

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For the first time, we have opened up the festival week to a partner programme that is based on our long-term local and national partnerships:

This year’s festival features several text-based works, and the programme is complemented by the Learning Lab for Text Workers organised by Tekstin talo in Helsinki (Finland). The workshop is tailored for text workers who work alone and in varying working conditions. 

Dance Theatre Tsuumi and artist Sonja Jokiniemi (Finland) will conduct a workshop titled Kyynelpaikka, open for all, that invites participants to confront their own experiences of grief and loss. The workshop is part of the process leading up to the new production Arvo which will premiere in Helsinki in November 2026. The work explores the Karelian tradition of lamentation and delves into the physical experience of weeping.

The ANTI Festival and the Oulu-based ILME have co-curated Adam Kinner and Christopher Willes’ (Canada) internationally touring work MANUAL as part of Oulu’s European Capital of Culture programme. The work can only be experienced in Oulu, but here in Kuopio we’ll be joining in the spirit of this intimate one-on-one performance set in a public library. Also, remember that it’s only a four-hour train ride from Kuopio to Oulu!

ANTI Festival itself is part of the Kuopio Art Weeks which will be held for the first time this autumn. This unique collaboration between four organisations enables a month-long multidisciplinary series of art events that can be experienced throughout the city. The events are, in addition to ANTI, Digital Art Festival Kuopio 7 – 13 September, Kuopio Media Art Festival 19 Sep – 25 October, and Valoilmiö on 7 October 2026. During the weekend of the ANTI Festival, you will have time to experience some of the Kuopio Media Art Festival programme! 

Please note that while the entire ANTI Festival programme is free of charge, the partner programme is partially ticketed, and our partners are responsible for ticket sales.

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It is a tremendous privilege to be able to work with all the festival’s partners and artists. Thank you for your work that enlightens and opens our minds and bodies in these paralysing times. I thank our supporters for still making all of this possible and express my warmest thanks to the ANTI Festival staff.

You, you, you and you,

welcome to our 25th anniversary celebration, where the festival itself will be handing out gifts. Thank you for accepting our gift. Your participation is the most valuable gift for us.

Elisa Itkonen
Director and Lead Curator