Statement: Live Art Prize Shortlist 2025

Through a consultation process with fourteen artists, researchers, curators and ANTI Festival alumnae, we arrived at a long list of over four dozen brilliant mid-career artists. Looking carefully at each nominee’s practice, the Festival’s curatorial team (Elisa Itkonen & Season Butler) selected these three for their committed and groundbreaking contributions to the field of Live Art.

At ANTI Festival 2025, these three artists will bring their work to Kuopio for Shortlist LIVE!, our chance to be inspired and moved by each artist’s unique vision and expert execution, together in time and space.

It is our sincere intention that the Prize shortlist serves as its own space for us to pay tribute to these artists, whose practice has made a substantial contribution to the field of Live Art over the course of their careers, and that the Shortlist LIVE! platform can serve to foster ongoing sustainability for each of them.

Shortlist LIVE! is also a key element of the deliberation process for the awarding of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, which provides the winner with a €15,000 cash prize and a €15,000 commission to bring a new work to the 2027 Festival.

As makers of experiential art within a challenging material economic framework, we are privileged to facilitate the ability for artists to persist into a through their mid-career stage and to provide a space to celebrate practices that continue to define the radicality of this form.

These artists create work that lingers and resonates through our imaginations, moving us in the moment of the encounter and long afterwards. We have been deeply impressed by the depth of their historical, social and political engagement through rigorous research and community praxes, which saturate and suffuse the ferocious beauty of their work.

Each of these artists are masters of their craft, turning a painstaking and intrepid hand to the physical, philosophical and emotional material of the work they share with their audiences.

It is with gratitude and giddy excitement that we express our appreciation for all that these artists have given us through their careers so far. In this spirit, we invite you to explore and experience – hopefully with us, in time and space, in Kuopio, 9 to 14 September, 2025 – their incredible offerings.

Elisa Itkonen & Season Butler