Tiedote 4.9.2017

ANTI-festivaali järjestää vuoden 2017 tieteellis-taiteellisen seminaarin, Politics and Poetics of Water yhteistyössä Our Water-Conscious Land -projektin, Itä-Suomen yliopiston ja mainostoimisto Ad Kiivin kanssa. Seminaarissa kuullaan puheenvuoroja monialaisilta asiantuntijoilta, tutkijoilta ja taiteilijoilta, joita yhdistää kiinnostus veteen.

Ohjelma

Politics and Poetics of Water Seminar

12.00 – 13.00 Pop-up coffee service at the lobby

12.15 Opening
Haapaniemi School 6th Graders

12.25 Welcome
Prof. Maija-Riitta Hirvonen, Head of the Department of Environmental and Biological Sciences,
University of Eastern Finland

12.30 Greetings from City of Kuopio
Kirsi Soininen, Marketing Director

12.40 Watermeets Kuopio: About the project with Kuopion Vesi for ANTI Festival 2017
Minty Donald & Nick Millar (UK), Artist, ANTI Festival 2017

12.50 Finland, Enhancing Global Water Security
Antti Rautavaara, Senior Water Advisor, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland

13.10 Talking aquatic forensics and watery bodies
Andrew Mottershead from the artist duo French & Mottershead (UK), Artist, ANTI Festival 2017

13.30 Demonstrations from Water Wonderlab Game Jam
Tiina Arpola & Antti Kotimaa, Savonia University of Applied Sciences & Games for Health Finland

13.45 Panel Discussion: Finland and Water 100 years

Moderator: Ricardo Patino, Ad Kiivi

Ilkka Miettinen, Chief Researcher, National Institute for Health and Welfare
Simo Pehkonen, Professor University of Eastern Finland
Samuel Hartikainen, Researcher, University of Eastern Finland
Eero Antikainen, Research Manager, Savonia University of Applied Sciences
Milla Martikainen, Artist, ANTI Festival 2017
Andrew Mottershead, Artist, ANTI Festival 2017

Audience discussion

14.45 Water, water what are you?
Haapaniemi School 6th Graders

Presentation desks in the lobby:

UEF, ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Ad Kiivi, Kuopion Vesi, Finnish Water Forum, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Minty Donald & Nick Millar (UK): Watersmeets Kuopio

Ilmainen pysäköinti yliopiston henkilökunnan P-parkkialueella.

Our Water-Conscious Land -projektin tarkoituksena on edistää sitä, että Suomi 100-vuotisjuhlavuotenaan toimisi kansainvälisenä puhtaan veden, sen säilyttämisen ja suojelemisen puolestapuhujana.

Media release 23.8.2017

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival starts in only one month on 19th September and takes over the public spaces of Kuopio again. The festival has built a programme of projects around water as, this year, it has partnered with projects and organisations working around it, such as Our Water-Conscious Land project and Kuopio Water Company. Artists, from around the world, work in the framework of politics and poetics of water.

Updated programme and schedule on our website!
The festival is free to attend.

For more information, go to our website or contact Elisa Itkonen: +358 50 305 2005, info@antifestival.com.
Follow us also on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter!

Opening day 19th Sep 2017

Artefact (film) & Festival Opening

Tuesday 19th Sep at 5 pm.
Maria stage of Kuopio City Theatre | Niiralankatu Street 2

In 2016, Willoh S.Weiland and JR Brennancreated the unforgettable production Artefact, performed with hundreds of local participants in Kuopio. The work has now being edited into a remarkable film to be screened during the festival week. READ MORE

Gwendoline Robin (BE): Cratère n°6899

Tuesday 19th Sep at 8 pm.
Shopping centre Sektori | Puijonkatu Street 23

Cratère n°6899 is a performative approach to the element of Water.

“I look for the link between the worlds of stars and oceans through our relationship with the water. A comet falls into the Earth. A crater is formed: different transformations appear. The landscape evolves in the rhythm of these actions.”
READ MORE

Terike Haapoja (FI): Studies on Freedom I

Tuesday 19th Sep (– Friday 22nd Sep)
3 pm. – 7 pm. Provincial Courthouse (the yard) | Minna Canthin katu Street 64

In collaboration with a local high school, we asked the students to write a letter to the inmates, where they can express their understanding of freedom and responsibility, norms and punishments, and the freedoms and lacks of freedoms they experience as parts of their life outside the prison, as well as ask questions from the prisoners. The letters were read by the voluntary student class of Kuopio Prison prisoners who then responded to them in writing. These letters can be heard from headphones located outside the courthouse. READ MORE

Terike Haapoja (FI): Gravitation

Tuesday 19th Sep (– Saturday 23rd Sep)
Photographies and book preview

Gravitation marks a turn to a more intimate, direct approach in Haapoja’s practice. The series of c. 80 photographs are born from a personal urgency that bypasses discourse. Created at fast pace during a time of severe physical and emotional distress, the images reveal moments of desire, mortality, abandonment and agency, objectification and the desire to become an object. The exhibition presents selected prints from the series alongside a preview of the upcoming publication Gravitation (2017). READ MORE

Join our Facebook event!

Media release 10.8.2017

The 2016 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, Terike Haapoja returns to Kuopio and ANTI Festival 19-24 September 2017 with a series of new works;
Studies on Freedom I-II and Gravitation (images).

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. How are we, as people, bound to the binaries of freedom and subjectivity? Studies on Freedom is a commissioned series of works for ANTI Festival. The two studies discuss
freedom and it’s limits:

“In our society freedom is everything, the ultimate goal. Yet our freedom is conditional, subjected to rules we’ve internalized so well that guarding them becomes who we are. Void of true agency, freedom becomes a burden where all responsibility lays on the individual,”

Haapoja writes in her artist statement.

Studies on Freedom I

In collaboration with a local high school, we asked the students to write a letter to the inmates, where they can express their understanding of freedom and responsibility, norms and punishments. The letters will be read by a voluntary student class of Kuopio Prison prisoners who then in turn respond in writing.

Readings of these letters can be heard on headphones located outside a provincial courthouse, in which the level of freedom of citizens is ultimately decided. 19-23 September.
READ MORE

Studies on Freedom II

consists of an interactive exchange between audience members and the artists. Audience members and the artist negotiate a rental contract where one party gives their body for the other to use for
a mutually agreed period of time.

The conditions, limits and the duration of the contract are negotiated together at The Law Office of Karvinen, Sarkkinen & Sallinen. 20-22 September.
READ MORE

Gravitation

marks a turn to a more intimate, direct approach in Haapoja’s practice. The series of c. 80 photographs are born from a personal urgency that bypasses discourse. Created at fast pace during a time of severe physical and emotional distress, the images reveal moments of desire, mortality, abandonment and agency, objectification and the desire to become an object. The exhibition presents selected prints from the series alongside a preview of the upcoming publication Gravitation (2017).

Gravitation will be published in the Salon Dalhman Gallery in Berlin during the Berlin Art Week on 11th September and in the programme of ANTI Festival on 19th September. READ MORE

Terike Haapoja (FI)

Terike Haapoja is a Finnish visual artist living in New York and Inkoo, Finland. She represented Finland in the Venice Biennale 2013 with Closed Circuit – Open Duration exhibition, studying mortality and relationship between human and nature. Haapoja is the first Finnish winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. In addition, Haapoja’s and writer Laura Gustafsson’s History of Other (2012-) was awarded a national media art prize in Finland.

www.terikehaapoja.net

For more information

visit our website or contact Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival, +358 50 305 2005.
Press photos: antifestival.com/en/media

ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and the productions in Kuopio are funded by:

Our relationship with technology, nature and the nonhuman world has been the focus of my practice for more than a decade. The boundary that I have explored for so long has never been only about ‘interspecies connection’, but about connection in general. It has been driven by the question of how to connect with what is beyond myself; of how to relate to the beings and forces I live among.

Through which means do I understand that which I, ultimately, cannot? The question of the nonhuman has always been a personal, embodied one. It has gradually led me to look at society through structures of connection and disconnection, inclusion and exclusion, in ways that are more and more related to my own bodily being.

When you come close to your own mortality, all abstraction falls off from the question regarding existence. The ethical demand – how to live with others – becomes rooted in a heightened sense of vulnerability and exposure of your own bodily being. Instead of consciously thinking of others, you hear your own fears and desires and then expand that notion outwards, trying to grasp that these same depths live in every being. We fear for our bodies and reach out to connect with those of others’. That is all.

In order to navigate the question of how to live in this world, I find it necessary to reconnect with that bodily, direct, intimate way of being. I need to let my body tell me what moves me, what turns me on and what I crave. Our tolerance for complexity is vanishing, but complexity is where truth lays, and the particular experience of oneself is the path to that truth; a truth that doesn’t settle and yet allows understanding. Everything comes back to the body.

The photography series Gravitation was born out of an urgency where only creation mattered, and where creation was the manifestation of being alive, of the vitality of pain, fear and desire. In more ways than one Gravitation saved me. It carried me to an other side and to a place where the abstractions of theory feel important but remote. It also encouraged new approaches and engagement with new mediums.

Once I had a desire to give away my own will and cradle in the safety of someone else’s rules. In our society freedom is everything, the ultimate goal. Yet our freedom is conditional, subjected to rules we’ve internalized so well that guarding them becomes who we are. Void of true agency, freedom becomes a burden where all responsibility lays on the individual. The dream is that captivation frees us from that burden. And the tragedy is that as free subjects we cannot give away our freedom. It can only be taken from us in force by others. Those outside this law are perhaps only – yes – wild animals. Studies on Freedom, the participatory gesture created for ANTI Festival, approaches this condition.

In August 2017
Terike Haapoja

The writer is the 2016 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and returns to Kuopio with a series of new works, Studies on Freedom I-II and Gravitation.

Media release 28.7.2017

The ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival returns to Kuopio, Finland this September and the highlight of this year’s event will be the announcement of the 2017 winner of International Prize for Live Art.

The Prize – now in its 4th year – is the world’s only International Prize for Live Art, and
at €30,000 it is also one of the richest in the arts.

Four outstanding contemporary artists or collectives from across the globe are
competing for the prize.

Tania El Khoury (Lebanon)

Tania El Khoury is a live artist working in London and Beirut. She creates interactive installations and performances in which the audience is an active collaborator. Tania’s work has been shown across five continents, in spaces ranging from museums to cable cars. She has been nominated for a number of prizes and is the recipient of the Total Theatre Innovation and the Arches Brick awards.

Tania is currently working on a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research and publications focus on interactive Live Art after the Arab uprisings.

Tania is associated with Forest Fringe and is co-founder of Dictaphone Group, an urban research and site-specific performance collective in her native Beirut.

www.taniaelkhoury.com

Sethembile Msezane (South Africa)

Msezane maps out how the process of commemorative practice informs constructs of history, mythmaking, and ultimately addresses the absence of the black female body in public spaces and sculpture.  In 2015 she performed at the removal of the John Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town (left).

Selected group shows include Women’s Work and The Art of Disruptions at the Iziko South African National Gallery (2016), Dis(colour)ed Margins at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (2017), Re[as]sisting Narratives at Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2016), plus a recent solo show at Johannesburg’s Gallery MOMO, titled Kwasuka Sukela.

www.sethembile-msezane.com

Alexandra Pirici (Romania)

An artist with a background in choreography, Pirici works in different mediums, from performance to visual arts to music. Her works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (Romanian Pavilion for the 55^th edition of the Bienniale, together with Manuel Pelmus), Tate Modern, 9^th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, the 12^th Swiss Sculpture Exhibition, the Van Abbemuseum, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. She received the Excellence Award from the National Dance Center in Bucharest in 2015.

This year sees Alexandra participating in the decennial international art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster.

The vacuum cleaner (UK)

Working across art forms including performance, installation and film, the vacuum cleaner addresses issues such as consumerism and mental health. From-one man shows to large-scale participatory events, his approach is both subtle and extreme, but always candid, provocative and playful. The vacuum cleaner’s work has been exhibited throughout the UK, with recent major commissions including the Wellcome Collection, Broadmoor Hospital and FACT. Internationally, he has shown at  Festspiele /Gessnerallee (Zurich) and Vooruit/Dr Guislain Hospital Museum (Ghent). Vacuum cleaner’s films have been commissioned by BBC4 and Channel 4. He was a Tate Modern/Britain Artist in Residence 2016/17 and is an Artsadmin Artist.

www.thevacuumcleaner.co.uk

International jury

The winner of this year’s International Prize for Live Art will be chosen by a jury consisting of international art professionals. In the Chair is Fiona Winning (AU), formerly the Head of Programming at Sydney Festival and currently co-designer of Australia’s National Institute of Dramatic Arts’ landmark Master of Fine Arts (Cultural Leadership) course.

Also on the panel are Lois Keidan (UK) (co-founder of the Live Art Development Agency, previously Director of Live Arts at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London) and Paris-based Taiwanese artist and curator, River Lin (TW), who works extensively across the fields of performing and visual arts.

ANTI Festival Directors Gregg Whelan and Johanna Tuukkanen;

“This year’s shortlist features four incredibly compelling artists and this is a great moment to take stock of the achievements of each, to celebrate their work and more broadly to mark the growing, and brilliantly exciting, presence of Live Art in cultural life.”

The ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art was awarded for the first time during the 2014 ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival. The Prize is €30,000, making it one of the biggest in the arts. The winning artist receives a cash prize of €15,000 and the same amount in the form of production support to bring a new work to the ANTI Festival the following year. Previous winners are – 2014 Cassils (Canada / USA), 2015 Willoh S. Weiland (Australia) and 2016 Terike Haapoja (Finland). The future of the Prize is secured with the Saastamoinen Foundation, which generously supports it.

For more information, go to our website for the Prize!

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