As a jury we would like to express the complexity of our arriving at a decision, in particular given the difficult conditions of this year 2020. The current pandemic has impacted all areas of life bringing forth and enhancing a number of pre-existing socio-political issues while adding a whole range of other challenges to all of us as a social collective.

In  respect to ANTI Festival, the ongoing circumstances of the restrictions of the pandemic have  led to a number of limitations, making it impossible for some artists and one of the jury members to be able to attend ANTI in person. We would therefore like to start our considerations by acknowledging the extraordinary work by the whole team of ANTI in materialising such a brilliant program in less than ideal conditions. We have experienced a passionate and highly professional setting and would like to enthusiastically congratulate you on a wonderful experience in Kuopio. An added thank you goes to the audience whose forceful interest in and support of ANTI is important, many of the audience being local people for whom the festival has been an enduring and important feature over the years.

As a jury working within the conditions of the pandemic we have worked together whilst being distributed across locations and time zones, with Fiona Winning in the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation also now known as Sydney, and João Laia and Kira O’Reilly in Helsinki and Kuopio.

ANTI Festival has done its utmost to enable solutions that facilitate our workings in these circumstances. We have all viewed extensive documentation of the considerable bodies of works by each of the artists, and all the artists SHORTLIST LIVE works have been experienced in person by one or more of us. We have discussed at length the import and impact of this, the difficulties and discomforts this affords, and with that –  the trust and confidence we have strived to cultivate in working together. It has not been easy – and yet what a privilege this stimulating difficulty has been.

We would like to recognise and endorse the four exceptional artists and collective in this year’s Shortlist Live, our appreciation of their work being presented thus, and of the ideas, possibilities and provocations they have all brought to fruition to us their audiences and indeed to us their communities. Therefore we would like to address each artist and to truly give to this moment the proper attention and recognition they each so amply deserve.

We are now going to share with you our statements about each artist in alphabetical order after which we will announce the winner.

Ingri Fiksdal

Within the worldings of Ingri Fiksdales work lies the choreographic assembling of matter / – choero\graphic assemblages that activate systems of interaction – between bodies – all manner of bodies –  that unfold over time. We as viewers are implicated by being  offered the proposition of a fictioning, one with real world implications with which to rethink the received hierarchies of bodies that matter.

In Ingri’s work with her collaborators, objects, materials and things there a minimal imposition of compositional forces – so that all aspects of the materials and processes of the works are acknowledged as agential choreographic forces – combining in durational assemblages with the full political implications of what it is to assemble, to gather, to co-create and to be – together.

These are potent and pivotal concepts that are brought into striking activation in her approach to site, using landscape and place as a dramaturgy within which these abstracted bodies are given agency, and audience positions itself in relation to, so as to experience an embodied cognition of work.

We are moved by the direction of this accumulated body of work and it’s futures, the horizons it acknowledges and moves towards, co-creating with those who Ingri seeks to involved and to include.

Geumhyung Jeong

Geumhyung gives life to objects through her body and in turn hers – the artist’s body is transformed through the objects.

The risks Geumhyung takes in her work are considerable, both in what she reveals and the mechanisms of how she does so by the means in which she structures the relations between her own physicality and that of those she is operating and tending to. Lines of power, desire, and politics of care are animated through these performed orientations of interactions.  There is an enormous sensitivity in her manipulation of the figures, models and parts – which she imbues with life and liveliness,  bringing us the audience into experiences of precarity, to the edges of failure and to intense trepidation.

The traditional gendering of literacies and discourses found in  engineering rationales and of technologies are subtly undone. There is a confidence and assurance of competency in the handling and articulation of the figures, machines and objects, whose tender reciprocal sensitivities enact critical questions around relationships between humans and machines. These enactments  invite speculation as to the implications and prevarications of the technologies we build, care  and think about, our affective interiors are mirrored in these models, figures and mechanics.

Brian Fuata

Brian’s work across various modes of presentation is framed through structured/timed improvisation that dialogues directly with his audience. He performed a riveting monologue for the Jury via Zoom and for a live audience at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival in Sydney, each time carefully  considering the mode of reception for his audience.

He located his genealogy, his geography within the colonial fiction of Australia and the Pacific, and his practice in the context of contemporary performance, visual and live art. The merging of hisphysicality, his musicality of language and playful associative subject matter is brimming with relevance to the contemporary moment. From care during the pandemic, to being a queer Samoan Australian in the contemporary art world, and from the women in his artistic milieu to the Black Lives Matter movement. He embodies apparitions, ghosts in our culture – that call up the unspeakable and the wondrous. His performance is delicate and agile – alive with criticality, generosity, energy and love.

W A U H A U S

W A U H A US decided not to be an individual but a collective – one that is dynamic, fostering worlds that build through the connectivity of their exchanges and processes. They demonstrate this integrity and with it their position as game changers in the Finnish context, and by extension internationally.

Wauhaus has created a powerful body of work which pushes boundaries by questioning institutionalised conceptions regarding art, performance and humanity. Materialising an expansive and yet highly coherent practice, Wauhaus engages with key issues marking the now, offering other forms of perceptual knowledge which sharply question what the world is and what it might become. Such an opening into the other is of key relevance in a global panorama where exclusionary ideas and positions have been progressively gaining traction and recovers strangeness as a powerful poetic and political tool. Likewise by operating as a collective, Wauhaus emphasises the need to revive communal forms of understanding and agency, countering the ongoing drive towards individualism and replacing it with caring and empathic shared ways of doing.

It was a great joy for ANTI Festival when Sonya Lindfors was awarded the 2018 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art. We were very disappointed and saddened when contract negotiations with Lindfors ended with the dissolution of our collaboration in June 2020.

Unfortunately, a related article published in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper on 31 October 2020 and statements made by Lindfors on social media contain some incorrect information, which we would like to correct here:

There is no currently valid agreement subject to an ongoing contractual dispute between ANTI Festival and Sonya Lindfors as implied by the article published in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper.

ANTI Festival has paid Sonya Lindfors all compensation and fulfilled all its contractual obligations under the agreement made in 2018. We have supported Lindfors’ work with EUR 30,000 in accordance with the agreement.

ANTI paid the cash prize of EUR 15,000 to Sonya Lindfors’ account on 13 December 2018. During 2019, ANTI paid around EUR 8,000 in expenses related to Lindfors’ project in accordance with a budget prepared and agreed on together with Lindfors. On 30 June 2020, the festival also paid an invoice of EUR 7,500, the remaining sum of the prize allocated to production costs, for Urbaanin taidetanssin tuki ry, an association represented by Lindfors.

We communicated on 15 June 2020 by email that we no longer have grounds for continuing our collaboration as our views are too far apart.

Media release 22.9.2020

Shortlist LIVE! is an entity built around the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, which presents the annual award nominees extensively. One part of the entity is the bilingual Shortlist LIVE! publication.

This year, the world’s only Live Art Prize nominees are Ingri Fiksdal from Norway, Brian Fuata from Australia, Geumhyung Jeong from South Korea and the Finnish art collective W A U H A U S.

The core of the Shortlist LIVE! publication consists of artist essays on nominees for the prize. The authors of the essays are proposed by the artists themselves. The essays are written by Amanda Jane Steggell (Ingri Fiksdal), Lucreccia Quintanilla (Brian Fuata), Ginevra Bria (Geumhyung Jeong) and Aune Kallinen
(W A U H A U S). More about the four essays below.

In addition to the artist essays, Shortlist LIVE! #2 features an interview with Dana Michel, the 2019 Winner of the Prize. The texts in the publication form a picture of the time that we are living now, the time of Covid-19. Thomas F. DeFrantz, a Live Art professional who was a member of last year’s jury, thinks back in his article and writes about the ANTI Festival 2019, how it was to watch and feel art together in Kuopio. He also discusses the core issues of the jury work. We have published DeFrantz’s article also online!

Buy your copy of the Publication on liveartprize.com and at ANTI Festival, Kuopio 27.10.-1.11.2020!

Amanda Jane Steggell: Ingri Fiksdal

Ingri Fiksdal’s artist portrait starts to form from the Norwegian fjords. The author, Amanda Jane Steggell, Professor of Choreography at the Oslo University of the Arts, takes the reader on a journey into Fiksdal’s childhood landscapes and her first art and culture experiences, thus drawing a cinematic arc of Fiksdal’s growth as a major choreographer and art scholar. The question of where artists get their inspiration and where their aesthetics are based gets a concrete resonance in this text.

Lucreccia Quintanilla: Brian Fuata

Artist, writer, dj and researcher Lucreccia Quintanilla recalls his and Brian Fuata’s first encounter and reflects Fuata’s artistic work on the stages of Australia’s anti-racist movement and the expectations towards BIPOC bodies in the arts’ context. Fuata’s art, often located in galleries and public spaces, is political and funny and direct, familial and warm at the same time. It’s not subject to preconceived expectations or assumptions. Quintanilla’s and Fuata’s friendship began already in 1997.

Ginevra Bria: Geumhyung Jeong

Photo: Tae Hwan KimGinevra Bria: Geumhyung JeongThe practice of Geumhyung Jeong, which uniquely combines robotics, automation and Live Art, is presented by freelance writer, curator and critic Ginevra Bria. The snappy text requires chewing, which is a great companion for Jeong’s art. With her background in theatre, dance and animated films Jeong has expanded her practice to the installations in recent years. Psychoanalysis, technology, post-Covid-19 could work as a keywords for this text called ‘Living Paradoxes of Immune Simulacra’ as well as the works by Jeong, to mention some.

Aune Kallinen: W A U H A U S

When thinking of WAUHAUS, the seven-person art collective, the essay’s writer, performance artist and lecturer in Contemporary Performance Aune Kallinen ends up thinking about garden, things that are connected, class and taste, how analogies can prevent us from seeing and lead us astray, resilience, courage, of being unprejudiced, of freedom and space, thinking of of all kinds of things. The lyrical essay opens W A U H A U S’ works and philosophy in a moving and multisensory way. Appropriate considering the subject of the text.

Editorial Staff & Publishers

Shortlist LIVE! publication #2 has been edited by Heidi Backström. Tomi Leppänen is responsible for its visual look and skill. The translator is Essi Brunberg. The magazine is published in collaboration with ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and Live Art Development Agency (LADA).

Shortlist LIVE! is supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation and the Kone Foundation.

by Thomas F. DeFrantz

A lifetime ago, before COVID-19, we gathered in Kuopio for the wondrous ANTI-2019 Festival. I was called as a juror for the 2019 International Prize for Live Art. While the work took me far from my family and home in North Carolina of the USA, I was grateful for the opportunity to wonder, alongside audiences in Finland, at the four performances selected for live presentation. At the end of the festival, one of these four artists would receive the grand prize.

In the US context, I have often served as a jurist or adjudicator, a panelist or expert witness to respond to Live Art and performance art, as well as many grant and residency applications. This sort of work is always exciting to me, even as it offers a huge responsibility. Why a focus on this and not that, or the determination of these instead of those? What distinguishes one experience, or an artistic gesture, from another? How shall we assess the encounters with Live Art?

I practice a vigilance toward my creative values, which are against racism, for feminism and affirm queer living. These values were revealed in our artist project meetings in the SLIPPAGE laboratory and performance studio that I direct in the US, and they are ways of being together that I continue to hone in everyday life. I arrived in Kuopio eager for encounters that resist the colonial patriarchies so entangled with contemporary life. In so many places on the planet, people encounter hateful misogyny and blank refusals to acknowledge how queer operations revitalize us all. I came to ANTI ready to be confused and surprised, open to the encounters and eager for ways to be surprised by Live Art that speaks to the particularities of experience.

Kuopio 62.89° North

In the past I had offered creative work in Trondheim, Norway and Umeå, Sweden. Still I was astonished at arrival in yet another Nordic city, nearing Lapland. Surely the indigenous people here have stories to tell about art-making, performance and survival against the odds? Our contemporary Live Art festival moves among landscapes always in formation, never finished, at once quiet and brimming with activity. In September the weather seemed chilly to me, and the drizzling skies called for hearty beer and the necessary purchase of gloves and a hat for warmth.

I took a day or two to walk the city, to venture far afield past the quiet (for me) streets toward the lakes, up and down the hills that surround the streets, and to look at the water. Clearing and sharpening my senses to prepare for the many performances ahead. 2019 brought an incredible array of performances together, including a funerary preparation, participatory archery and an immersive theatrical rendering of a 19th-century wedding. And many, many, discussions and meditations on death and dying, following the theme of the festival.

My juror colleagues hailed from the UK and Finland; Saara Turunen, our excellent leader, and Daniel Brine could not have been better companions on this extravagant adventure. Our work together allowed us many, many conversations and time to explore the creative dossiers of the four shortlisted artists chosen to compete for the prize. We pored over the materials at breakfast and lunch, chatting with curiosity about our divergent points of view and moving closer to each other in order to perform our labour. ANTI Festival’s Artistic Directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan guided us expertly and gently to the places we needed to be, literally, but always stepping away from the conversation as we uncovered our shared work ethic. The challenge was clear: how to experience the work of these four artists through their portfolios, and through their live performances, to determine the recipient of the prize?

We discussed the ways that Live Art might be constituted in 2019: as actions that question assumptions, traditions or presumptions surrounding performance. That Live Art emerges exactly when boundaries of form are crossed and blurred, and things become confused. We agreed to assume the Live Art was a concept in flux, and also the glue that holds us together.

We met each artist for an hour as a jury, independent of their performances, over the two days of the finalist performances. We discovered the format for these meetings through our shared deliberations: artists would do whatever they wanted for half of that time, and then we would engage each other in the manner we found most useful for the rest of the time. We moved towards some general questions to pose to the artists.

Your work, what is it for?

What will it, and you, do for some sense of community?

What do you want your work to do in the world?

What have you been doing?

How does the work we will experience connect to a body of work, or to a narrative of how you describe what you do?

Does your work tilt towards a future of some sort?

And more questions:

To whom do you want to speak through your work?

What is most important to you?

What has led you here?

What would you like people to see in your work?

And a question that I never knew we would actually ask, but we did every time:

What would you do if you won the award?

We surprised each other, I think, in these intimate encounters: the jurors and the artists, each representing their expansive team of collaborators and the many, many gestures of creative life they have brought into the world. These small meetings were like tiny performance events; crafted for us and among us to reveal more of the sensibility that drove their making and their desire to matter in the world. With each gathering, we moved in re-orientated curiosity made anew, marveling at the world-making at hand.

World-Making

Because Live Art is surely world-making; imagining towards and from, through the here and now of performance. We jurors went to the shows along with other audience members, and reflected, imagined and came to love in ways we didn’t know before we met.

We wrote reflective texts for each of the artists met over those two days; these are collective thoughts from the team of jurors.

Keijaun Thomas

Keijaun Thomas reminds us that Live Art can transform how we feel in a second. To work through love and care as an artist – to take care of the audience in an encounter. We commend the strength of a voice questioning identity, which encourages us to question our own. What are the relationships between people and identities? How can we move towards each other? This work is a raft. It helps us to imagine not being afraid of touch. Live Art is a powerful form that can speak toward the marginalized and disenfranchised. Keijaun shows us that Live Art is the perfect form for this work, a true space for expression that may not be found in other art form practices. Bravery, intention and the ability to create emotions through ritual. The work asks: What are we going to do? The work demands: We need you to help us imagine.

Dana Michel

Constant surprises – intimacies and small gestures. Strength and physical ability, resisting presumptions and testing suppositions. Dana Michel makes work in order to see better and know better. She explores an archive enlivened through performance. Lifetimes of experience animated. Interiorities. Intuitive making with objects that become… free! A remarkable poetics of movement and imagery, bound up in an ethically-engaged approach to making and sharing. Modest and accurate, measured and structured. A faltering stagger reminds us to keep moving. A dreamlike character, charismatic and absurdist. We commend this clarity of performance, engaged in identity… dreamlike and touching in its way. A powerful presence of a female body. We commend your vision and your creative path towards remarkable, unexpected images.

Cuqui Jerez

What makes theatre? Things move and we move because of them. Floating, soaring, falling, alongside surges in sound. Again and again, we repeat, with changes in tone and texture; color and light fly by in an open expanse of time. The things resist: they are alive and random, inanimate and structured at once. Digression. Contemplation. Dancing in response to gravity. An Active Uncertainty becomes manifest. Who is backstage? An empty stage is not empty. The politics of beauty in a choreography of dramaturgy. An urgent sense of scale, with an attention to detail. An intellectual, devoted artist living in a love of art. Live Art as a personal exploration, becoming manifest because it must.

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Art is a social practice; we practice to live. Mammalian Diving Reflex offers an amazing body of work that connects people who become the artwork itself. The process of building a life is/as performance. The interplay of spontaneous responses and youthful curiosity. What if we could talk about these things in public? What sort of worlds could we build? Wondering at playing and playing at wondering, we stretch the encounter towards its inevitable futures as an unforgettable experience. What can we learn by participating in such an exercise? What is it to be vulnerable? How can we stand among each other and tell truths? Giving voice to marginalized people through a dynamic, strong process. A testing out for new ways to live together. A social and artistic endeavour to network people across differences.

In the end, we awarded the prize to Dana Michel, with this commendation:

Striking, clear images that arrive unexpectedly. Multitudes of memories wrapped into performance. Everything here matters, everything sounds, everything vibrates.

Congratulations to the 2019 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art winner, Dana Michel.

**

Heading home, Kuopio became a blur of compelling visions. Cold vistas of hills with trees rising up at a distance in every direction, inlets and lakes, ponds connected and guiding our movement to the airport. So many friendly conversations! I met a young man who had spent his entire life in and around Kuopio, who worked as a guide at one of the performances. I met travellers assembled on business who happened to hear about the festival and came to a show. And young revellers at the intense and totally necessary after-party, which included yet another performance by a rising popular entertainer. Looking back now, in month five of a US COVID-19 lockdown that keeps me home, I remember our gathering as an opening towards the Live Art I imagine we truly need now: work that arrives against racism, for feminism, and that affirms queer living. And I remember being propelled into the world anew, believing now in something else; believing that we can imagine a collective tomorrow that works toward care, each caring towards the other.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is a Director at SLIPPAGE: slippage.org.

The article is part of the Shortlist LIVE! publication #2 , get your copy on our online store!