ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival 2017 – Politics and Poetics of Water
Media release 5.6.2017
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 19th and 24th September 2017 in Kuopio, Finland. The festival has built a programme of projects around water as, this year, it has partnered with Our Water-Conscious Land, A project that proposes Finland, in its centenary year, should work as a global advocate for
clean water and its preservation and conservation.
”We thought about water and leisure, travel and exploration, about trade, industry and market forces, fresh water, salt water, grey water. We thought about the majority of the Earth’s surface also being the most abundant substance in the human body. And we thought about boarders, nationality, immigration, migration and displacement; daily events in the world’s oceans ask this of all us with an
urgency not experienced for many years”,
artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan say in their curatorial statement.
During the festival week, besides the artistic programme, we will also hold the ceremony to announce the 2017 recipient of ANTI Festival international Prize for Live Art which has quickly become one of the world’s most exciting cultural prizes. And between 14th and 20th September, we will be hosting the second Future DiverCities Lab in Kuopio where four international artists will be exploring how digital technologies can augment
socially engaged arts practices.
Save the festival dates and follow us also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!
For more information, please scroll down, visit our website or contact Festival Manager Elisa Itkonen:
+358 50 305 2005, info@antifestival.com
Human encounters in Calais and Kuopio:
Instant Dissidence (UK): Dancing With Strangers: From Calais to England
An intimate encounter with the refugee crisis in Europe. Artist Rita Marcalo visited the ‘Jungle’ in Calais, creating duets with residents, duets they hope to eventually dance with partners in the United Kingdom. Acting as proxy Marcalo brings their dances to Kuopio, standing in for the refugee as we stand in for their UK counterparts.
READ MORE
Ernest Truely (US) & New Start Finland: Kuopio Encounters
A community project led by artist Ernest Truely invites young people recently been granted asylum in Finland, along with young Finns, to playfully, and creatively, respond to ideas of identity. Truely began a series of creative workshops in early 2017. The project is a part of the New Start Finland! research project at the University of Eastern Finland. READ MORE
Water and catastrophe, healing water:
Milla & Pertti Martikainen (FI): Global Flood
A collaboration between a father and a daughter, one an artist, one a scientist, an emeritus professor of biogeochemistry. Global Flood is a discursive, sculptural, installation essaying the challenge of climate change. READ MORE
Maija Mustonen, Erno Aaltonen & Kaaos Company (FI): Pond
Presented in a swimming pool, by a company of mixed ability performers, Pond slows down life, allowing the body to take to water and be taken by water. Audiences are invited to join the performers, to feel and float, to be carried and held by water. READ MORE
ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art commission
Terike Haapoja (FI): Studies on Freedom
Terike Haapoja, the 2016 winner of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art will present an extraordinary new work commissioned by the award. After more than a decade of working on our relationship with nature and the nonhuman world, Haapoja is turning her gaze to the
figure of the human.
What is the free subject, that appears to be the opposite of the “animal” or “nature”, like? How are we, as people, bound to the binaries of freedom and restriction, subjectivity and being the object for the other? What are the laws, agreements and desires within which our humanity is constructed? READ MORE
In additon to the projects above, the festival programme includes works by artists and groups such as Mark Pozlep (IS), Joseph O’Farrell (AU), River Lin (TW), French & Mottershead (UK), Volna (RU) and many others. Updates coming up!
