ANTI Festival 2018 – First programme release!
Media release 12.4.2018
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. Internationally celebrated, award-winning artists from around the world will present projects engaged with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.
A playful engagement with the spaces of Kuopio, ANTI Festival’s host city, has been at the heart of our approach to bringing vital, exciting and surprising contemporary art to this inquisitive community. For 2018 we’re focusing our attentions properly on play and gaming.
Artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan are excited about the festival theme:
“Play and games, in forms as divergent as any other realm of human activity, sit at the heart of the contemporary experience. Games are in our pockets, on our screens, in our bodies, they are played in and on the city, the landscape, the sea, the globe. Games and play have become a way – an active way – of understanding
the world and each other.”
During the festival week, we will award ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one of world’s most exciting cultural prizes. We’ll also host the third Future DiverCitiesLab in Kuopio.
The full 2018 programme will be available in August.
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
We are proud to publish the five lead works of our international festival programme:
Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey (AU): Pivot
Acclaimed Australian artists, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, known in Kuopio for Megaphone Project (2014) and Shriek (2016), will bring their new work, Pivot to ANTI Festival.
Pivot’s boldly coloured over-sized seesaws invite you to stop and play – asking us to think deeply about the choices and commitments we make, every day, to create this complex world of ours. The interactive, intelligent seesaws listen as their riders meet, talk and share.
Rejoice in the absurdity of a seesaw ride, while democracy teeters towards ever more dangerous farce. As you enjoy the rare opportunity to ride, speak, and listen, remember that Pivot is programmed to
consider everything it hears.
Pivot will be installed in the park next to Kuopio City Hall – creating a meeting point
for the decision makers and residents of Kuopio.
Action Hero (UK): Oh Europa
A 30,000 km journey collecting love songs creates an unforgettable performance.
Over 6 months in 2018, the internationally celebrated duo Action Hero are travelling over 30,000km across Europe in a motorhome, recording love songs sung by the people they meet. They invite ANTI Festival and the people of Kuopio to contribute to the process by recording love songs in their mobile studio and by encountering material gathered on their journey through Europe’s contested identity.
This ever-evolving library of songs will be broadcast 24/7 from beacons placed across the continent by the intrepid duo. Listen and follow online. Action Hero pull into Kuopio towards the end of their adventure, bringing with them a performance created en route, a travelogue not to be missed!
Oh Europa seeks to re-imagine the ways we think about Europe and how we continue to share this space. Detached from political posturing, hollow rhetoric and empty sound bites, heartfelt love songs offer an opportunity to hear ourselves emerge out of the white noise.
Becker (NO), Goldberg (SE) & Langgård (NO): Still Life
A Nordic collaboration project between ANTI Festival, Norwegian set designer Signe Becker (NO), Swedish choreographer Rosalind Goldberg and Norwegian musician Ingvild Langgård.
A site-specific performance installation where sound, scenography and movement create
an ever-changing tableau vivant.
Over the last hundred years, technology has developed the usage of images and shaped our conception of reality. Looking at images displayed in the core of industrialism through to today’s constant exposure of lives through social media, Still Life reflects on contemporary paradigms of perception and the politics of images.
Tania El Khoury (LB) & ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art
Tania El Khoury, the 2017 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, returns to Kuopio with a new work made for ANTI Festival, and an international touring hit.
Tania El Khoury (LB): The Search for Power
ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art commission!
On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighbourhood, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the artist had grown up with the understanding that the problem with electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document that announced scheduled electricity
outages across the city of Beirut in 1952.
Artist and historian decided to research the history of power outages in Lebanon, delving into intersection between public utilities infrastructure, a people’s relationship to the state, and
the various popular mobilizations that shape both.
The Search for Power is an installation performance featuring the artist, the historian, and us – the audience.
Created in collaboration with Ziad Abu-Rish.
Tania El Khoury (LB): As Far As My Fingertips Take Me
The internationally renowned one-to-one performance comes to Kuopio!
As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is an encounter through a gallery wall between an audience member and a refugee. Their fingertips touch without seeing each other. The refugee marks us as we listen to those who have recently challenged border discrimination, stories that can be kept or washed away.
Performance by Tania El Khoury
Performed by Basel Zaraa
We will publish the full 2018 festival programme in June.
For our 2018 festival ANTI is partnering with Games for Health Finland and
the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.
Newsletter 3/2018
Welcome to our audience panel!
Divercities Kuopio workshop
Finland’s most satisfied residents live in Kuopio!
Welcome to our audience panel!
Wednesday 25th April 2018 at 5 pm.
ANTI OFFICE (Nahkurinkatu 1, Kuopio, Finland)
What have you always wanted to say to the organisers of ANTI Festival?
What kind of thoughts our coming festival programme brings up?
Where should our artworks be presented and when?
Who could participate in our processes?
Come and express your opinion!
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. The festival themes are play, playfulness, games and gaming, and we partner with Games for Health Finland and International Game Developers Association Kuopio Hub.
Our artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan have prepared a programme draft, and the audience panel will be the first one to hear about it. Now you have a chance to tell us what you think about our choices!
The event is targeted especially to residents of Kuopio who are not professionally working in arts, and the participant number is limited.
Please sign up by 12th April to info@antifestival.com!
When registering, please tell us, in few sentences, why you want to be a part of our audience panel!
Divercities Kuopio workshop
Thursday 26th April 2018 at 3 pm.
ANTI OFFICE (Nahkurinkatu 1, Kuopio, Finland)
Design Week Kuopio 2018 programme!
In the Divercities Kuopio workshop, the creatives local to Kuopio will take part in planning the internationally delivered Divercities mobile application and create a section for Kuopio full of inspiration and new, contemporary views to our city!
Led by Cédric Claquin (1D Lab founder/CEO), the workshop will introduce participants to creating their own ‘capsules’ and share creative and innovative initiatives from their city.
From street art to pop-up galleries, from game jams to festivals – where are the innovative places and events of Kuopio? How can this be represented through existing digital content? How can this stimulate curiosity and enable discovery?
Working languages: English (and Finnish)
Free of charge!
8 people may take part in the workshop through an open invitation.
Sign up by sending email to info@antifestival.com by 12th April!
The workshop is a part of the Creative Europe project, Future DiverCities which is a collaboration between ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and its 7 European partners.
Finland’s most satisfied residents live in Kuopio!
Yet another reason to visit Kuopio and ANTI Festival in September 2018:
A survey, published last week, reports that, among the 20 biggest cities in Finland, residents of Kuopio are the most satisfied with their hometown.
ANTI Festival has been working for an active, creative and diverse Kuopio for 16 years. We are celebrating this news together with the 120 000 residents of Kuopio!
Revealing the creative face of Kuopio in Divercities workshop
Thursday 26th April 2018 from 3 pm.
ANTI OFFICE | Nahkurinkatu 1, Kuopio, Finland
Design Week Kuopio 2018 programme!
Divercities app is a transnational digital tool that associates European cities: Kuopio, Brussels, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris, Lyon and Marseille. Developed by the French cooperative 1D Lab, the app aims at representing a city through creative content. Divercities is based on geolocalized and personalized recommendation, and it is meant to suggest activities and innovation near by the user. Continue reading…
Newsletter 2/2018
Art with and for immigrants 19.3.2018
Join us in Nordic Urban Lab 22.-24.3.2018
Art with and for immigrants
Discussion meeting on Monday 19th March 2018 at 4 pm.
ANTI OFFICE, Nahkurinkatu 1, Kuopio, Finland
ANTI Festival invites artists and art organisations, based in the Kuopio region, to discuss how to engage immigrants in art projects and services.
The meeting is targeted especially to artists working in the context of community arts and with socially engaged practices; to those who have worked or are willing to work with and for immigrants.
Please sign up to the meeting by 15th March by sending email to elisa@antifestival.com!
The working language of the meeting is Finnish but we are happy to be contacted in English in case you want to hear more about our initiative!
Background
In 2017, ANTI Festival contributed in the New Start Finland! research project which is a part of the larger research project PROMEQ – Inclusive Promotion of Health and Wellbeing (2016-2019).
New Start Finland! aims at promoting health, wellbeing and integration of immigrants and asylum seekers. The research project included four practical, experimental pilots on social marketing, and one of them was implemented by ANTI Festival.
In our pilot, Kuopio Encounters, we organised a series of creative workshops directed by artist Ernest Truely. Both new immigrants and Finnish in origin were invited to participate in the workshops through
May and October 2017.
The project has officially closed, and we are now willing to share the knowledge based on our experiences.
For more information: Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival.com, +358 50 305 2005
Photo: Pekka Mäkinen. Kuopio Encounters event 23.9.2017
Join us in Nordic Urban Lab!
22-24 March 2018
Location: Hanaholmen, Espoo, Finland
ANTI Festival is, naturally, present when Nordic cultural managers and strategists, urbanists and city planners, architects, visual and performance artists, researchers and academics, students, community organisers, urban activists, environmentalists, and city councilors gather together to discuss alternative culturally based urban strategies and practices.
40 specialists are invited to engage and to kick-start discussions, and ANTI Festival’s artistic director Johanna Tuukkanen is one of them.
Nordic Urban Lab will explore some of the key aspects of taking a cultural perspective on the city and on urban strategies and will include topics such as; cultural mapping, citizen led initiatives, activism and artivism, pop up and performative architecture, place making, gaming and urbanism, engaging and empowering citizens, public space as the key and new directions for public art. All important and
actual topics to ANTI!
Programme and registration at www.metropolis.dk!
Newsletter 1/2018
New Year NOW!
ANTI Festival’s winter is, usually, peaceful compared to the busy autumn but we never pause since now it’s time to update our plans for the new year!
The next edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018, and we will create a programme of projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming. We will partner with Games for Health Finland and the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.
We are super excited about the coming year!
Tania El Khoury returns to Kuopio
Tania El Khoury, the 2017 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art will return to Kuopio to create a new commissioned work for this year’s ANTI Festival.
Tania is currently working on the new piece and will make the first site visit in Kuopio in March.
Meanwhile at ANTI OFFICE
Our artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan and festival manager Elisa Itkonen got together for a team meeting in Kuopio right in the beginning of January. Brainstorm and discussion to make
the most out of the year 2018!
Johanna and Gregg are currently working on the festival programme and going through the 170 proposals we received in the open call, organised late last year.
Future DiverCities welcomes 2018
Future DiverCities project is a year-round project with activities both in Kuopio and in our partner cities across Europe and Canada. In Kuopio, we will arrange the next public programme as a part of Design Week Kuopio between 23rd and 29th April 2018. More about the coming DiverCities Kuopio workshop closer to the event!
The first publication on the Future DiverCities activities is now available online. You may find the Action Research booklet and other news in the
Future DiverCities newsletter!
Main photo by Pekka Mäkinen – Joseph O’Farrell (AU): 10 MINUTE DANCE PARTIES
Thank you for 2017 and Happy New Year!
Newsletter 12/2017
ANTI Festival sends a big warm thank you for the year 2017 to all our partners, artists, team members, voluntary assistants and audiences! We wish you Happy Holidays and all the best for the year 2018!
During the past year, ANTI Festival worked in several multidisciplinary projects, both local and international, and organised public events in Kuopio throughout the year:
In April, ANTI and Future DiverCities project contributed to Design Week Kuopio by organising a discussion meeting on co-design, in collaboration with the Design Week.
In the end of August, Kuopio is traditionally full of events, and ANTI took part in the season celebration with 14th PechaKucha Kuopio and open doors event.
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival 2017 took place between 19th and 24th September in Kuopio. The festival brought together artists and audience from across Finland and almost 10 different countries. The festival programme was inspired by the theme of water.
One of the highlights of the festival was the awarding of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. The 2017 winner of the Prize is Lebanese Tania El Khoury who will return to Kuopio and present a new commissioned work at ANTI Festival 2018.
We also hosted the second Future DiverCities Lab in Kuopio between 14th and 20th September.
Photo: Pekka Mäkinen – Tomi Paasonen: World Cup Bling Troopers 2016
ANTI Festival 2018
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018.
We invited artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming. The open call was organised between 16th November and 12th December 2017, and we received 170 proposals from 35 different countries.
For our 2018 festival ANTI is thrilled to announce partnerships with Games for Health Finland and the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.
Photo: Pekka Mäkinen – Maria Kärkkäinen: Take me into your arms 2012
ANTI Festival gathered proposals from around the world
Media release 14.12.2017
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. We invited artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming. The open call was organised between 16th November and 12th December 2017.
We received 170 proposals from 35 different countries.
The call out shows that ANTI Festival, Kuopio, live art and contemporary art have audiences across the globe, in every continent. Proposals were submitted from the United States and Canada, Brazil, India and Taiwan, Israel and South Africa, Australia and New Zealand as well as from several European countries.
Thank you to all the applicants!
The festival programme will be released during the spring and summer 2018.
For more information, contact Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival.com, +358 50 305 2005.
Photo: Pekka Mäkinen. Maria Kärkkäinen: Take me into your arms 2012
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival
Participation, dialogue and exchange: ANTI works with innovative artists on projects that
explore and explode urban space. ANTI began life in 2002. Since then we’ve produced 16 editions of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and have established a year-round programme of artist residencies and
cultural projects and events.
The festival is held annually in Kuopio, Finland. The city plays host to projects by artists from around the world that inhabit the spaces of public life – homes, shops, city squares, business, forests, lakes – and directly engage communities and audiences in the making and showing of their work. The festival is free to attend.
In collaboration
One week left to submit: Open Call for Proposals 2018
Newsletter 5.12.2017
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. We now invite artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.
A playful engagement with the spaces of Kuopio, ANTI Festival’s host city, has been at the heart of our approach to bringing vital, exciting and surprising contemporary art to this ever receptive and inquisitive community. For 2018 we’re focusing our attentions properly on play and gaming – gaming in both its contemporary sense as an engagement with digital environments but also in a more expanded sense: what games, and what play, as adults, as young people, as children, do we engaged with – what forms does play take, and where and
how to do we encounter it?
We have some clear answers, organised games are played habitually across the world – football, chess, bowls, snooker – all have their professional contexts but all too engender mass engagement and participation. Other forms of play, particularly for adults, have surfaced across the last half-century. Much is discussed around skateboarding and how that practice playfully renegotiates urban space, free-running and parkour have continued the same pursuit. Rural environments, long the space of adventure, journey and leisure, have their associated play activities and in more recent years digital and virtual technologies have created a playing space of incredible scale and value, one to rival, and royally beat, those more passive forms of entertainment.
Play and games, in forms as divergent as any other realm of human activity, sit at the heart of the contemporary experience. Games are in our pockets, on our screens, in our bodies, they are played in and on the city, the landscape, the sea, the globe. They keep us well, they move us, orientate us, challenge us, frustrate us and entertain us. Games and play have become a way – an active way – of understanding the world and each other.
For our 2018 festival ANTI is thrilled to announce partnerships with Games for Health Finland and the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.
Games for Health Finland is coordinated by the Savonia University of Applied Sciences.
Submitting a Proposal
When proposing your project please take into account that ANTI Festival presents its programme in public space, this includes interior spaces and privately-owned spaces. We do not show projects in traditional cultural spaces and houses thus your proposed project will need to have an integral relationship with the place
in which it is presented.
All proposals must be sent using this electronic form and
written in English.
The form allows a link to be made to online documentation of previous work and for applicants to attach a CV and a maximum of three supporting images. Proposals that do not strictly conform to these guidelines
will not be considered.
We advice the applicants to get familiar with the artistic direction of ANTI Festival by reviewing our
past projects on, for example, our Vimeo page!
The proposal deadline is 12.12.2017 (at the midnight).
Proposed projects may respond to one or more of the following areas:
Play and social space
Play and subjectivity
Play and physical space
Play and wayfinding
Game play as social encounter
Game ‘space’ as site of social exploration
Play and low/no technology
Play and technology
Virtual play
Play and wellbeing
Public play environments
Games, engagement and participation
Professionalised play
Play and leisure
Play and competition
Cross-generational play
Further information: info@antifestival.com
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival
Participation, dialogue and exchange: ANTI works with innovative artists on projects that
explore and explode urban space.
ANTI began life in 2002. Since then we’ve produced 16 editions of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and have established a year-round programme of artist residencies and cultural projects and events.
The festival is held annually in Kuopio, Finland. The city plays host to projects by artists from around the world that inhabit the spaces of public life – homes, shops, city squares, business, forests, lakes – and directly engage communities and audiences in the making and showing of their work. The festival is free to attend.
In collaboration with
Newsletter 11/2017
ANTI taking part in multidisciplinary discussions
ANTI Festival is a part of several multidisciplinary networks and projects, both international and national. One of our most important international collaboration projects is Future DiverCities – an initiative of 10 cultural partners in Europe and Canada funded by Creative Europe programme.
ANTI is also contributing to the New Start Finland! project which is a part of the larger research programme PROMEQ – Inclusive Promotion of Health and Wellbeing (2016-2019).
In December, the two projects are taking ANTI to public forums and discussion meetings, you can read more about below. Both events are open to all and free to attend. Welcome!
Co-Creation in Community Services for Immigrants – New Start Finland! forum in Kuopio
Monday 11th December 2017
University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio campus, Tietoteknia, auditorium (Savilahdentie 6, Kuopio)
New Start Finland! study has benchmarked the quality of life of new immigrants in Eastern Finland and piloted the use of co-creation in resettlement services for individual immigrants in regional communities.
ANTI Festival contributed to New Start Finland! with the Kuopio Encounters pilot; through contemporary arts practices, we aimed at promoting social participation among new immigrants. In the New Start Finland! Forum, festival manager Elisa Itkonen will reflect on the Kuopio Encounters pilot.
Working languages are Finnish and English. Full programme and registration guidelines on the website of University of Eastern Finland!
Creative Europe seminar in Helsinki
Thursday 14th December 2017
Korjaamo, (Töölönkatu 51, Helsinki)
The Creative Europe desk in Finland invites public to learn about Creative Europe projects and Finnish organisations behind them. ANTI Festival’s Artistic Director – Senior Producer Johanna Tuukkanen will present ANTI Festival and the Future DiverCities project in the event.
Full programme and registration guidelines online!
Open Call for Proposals – submit now!
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. We now invite artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.
All proposals must be sent using an electronic form and written in English.
Full application guidelines on our website!
The proposal deadline is 12.12.2017 (at the midnight).
Video memories from ANTI Festival 2017
Did you miss ANTI Festival this year? You attended the festival but didn’t have time to see all the artworks? See our collection of videos online! We document all the festival works, and the videos are created by Kim Saarinen.
See for example, Global Flood by Milla and Pertti Martikainen and Cleansing Water by River Lin!
We’ll be adding more videos to our Vimeo page during the next few weeks!
Photos: Pekka Mäkinen
Play, games and gaming driving ANTI Festival 2018 – Open Call for Proposals
Media release 16.11.2017
The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. We now invite artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.
A playful engagement with the spaces of Kuopio, ANTI Festival’s host city, has been at the heart of our approach to bringing vital, exciting and surprising contemporary art to this ever receptive and inquisitive community. For 2018 we’re focusing our attentions properly on play and gaming – gaming in both its contemporary sense as an engagement with digital environments but also in a more expanded sense: what games, and what play, as adults, as young people, as children, do we engaged with – what forms does play take, and where and
how to do we encounter it?
We have some clear answers, organised games are played habitually across the world – football, chess, bowls, snooker – all have their professional contexts but all too engender mass engagement and participation. Other forms of play, particularly for adults, have surfaced across the last half-century. Much is discussed around skateboarding and how that practice playfully renegotiates urban space, free-running and parkour have continued the same pursuit. Rural environments, long the space of adventure, journey and leisure, have their associated play activities and in more recent years digital and virtual technologies have created a playing space of incredible scale and value, one to rival, and royally beat, those more passive forms of entertainment.
Play and games, in forms as divergent as any other realm of human activity, sit at the heart of the contemporary experience. Games are in our pockets, on our screens, in our bodies, they are played in and on the city, the landscape, the sea, the globe. They keep us well, they move us, orientate us, challenge us, frustrate us and entertain us. Games and play have become a way – an active way – of understanding the world and each other.
For our 2018 festival ANTI is thrilled to announce partnerships with Games for Health Finland and the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.
Games for Health Finland is coordinated by the Savonia University of Applied Sciences.
Submitting a Proposal
When proposing your project please take into account that ANTI Festival presents its programme in public space, this includes interior spaces and privately-owned spaces. We do not show projects in traditional cultural spaces and houses thus your proposed project will need to have an integral relationship with the place
in which it is presented.
All proposals must be sent using this electronic form and
written in English.
The form allows a link to be made to online documentation of previous work and for applicants to attach a CV and a maximum of three supporting images. Proposals that do not strictly conform to these guidelines
will not be considered.
We advice the applicants to get familiar with the artistic direction of ANTI Festival by reviewing our
past projects on, for example, our Vimeo page!
The proposal deadline is 12.12.2017 (at the midnight in Finnish time).
Proposed projects may respond to one or more of the following areas:
Play and social space
Play and subjectivity
Play and physical space
Play and wayfinding
Game play as social encounter
Game ‘space’ as site of social exploration
Play and low/no technology
Play and technology
Virtual play
Play and wellbeing
Public play environments
Games, engagement and participation
Professionalised play
Play and leisure
Play and competition
Cross-generational play
Further information: info@antifestival.com
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival
Participation, dialogue and exchange: ANTI works with innovative artists on projects that
explore and explode urban space.
ANTI began life in 2002. Since then we’ve produced 16 editions of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and have established a year-round programme of artist residencies and cultural projects and events.
The festival is held annually in Kuopio, Finland. The city plays host to projects by artists from around the world that inhabit the spaces of public life – homes, shops, city squares, business, forests, lakes – and directly engage communities and audiences in the making and showing of their work. The festival is free to attend.
In collaboration with