Open Call for Artists and Curators to participate in the Global City Local City Labs
3.9.2020
Global City Local City is a new international laboratory platform – initiated as a collaboration between ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival in Kuopio, Finland, Reykjavík Dance Festival in Iceland and
The Map Consortium in the United Kingdom.
The GCLC labs are an initiative aimed at bringing together artists and curators whose work centers upon hyper-localised or locally-responsive approaches to place. Art workers whose work perhaps relies upon the initiation of local collaborations, responds to local sites, or engages with local histories, situations or conditions.
The GCLC labs will be a platform for art making through experimentation, research and knowledge sharing – a platform for a community to gather and share experiences, approaches, questions and perspectives in relation to the making of hyper-localised locally-responsive work. The lab time will be divided up between artists and curators engaging in their own work and engaging in situations that facilitate dialogue and exchange.
Partially developed in response to the current mobility challenges – caused by the global pandemic – the lab will support artists and curators to participate remotely from their own base location. Particular formats and approaches will facilitate exchange between participants under these conditions – and special focus will be placed on how these emerging conditions are affecting the nature of their work.
Schedule & How to participate?
There will be two labs in total in the year 2020:
Kuopio lab from October 20th to 31st
Reykjavík lab from November 10th to 21st
The labs do not require physical presence in the cities;
we will facilitate your participation via a video communication tool.
For artists living in Finland or Iceland: Selected artists/curators living in Finland will be invited to stay in Kuopio throughout the lab dates and to work on the ground in a lab studio space; selected artists/curators living in Iceland will be invited to stay in Reykjavík throughout the lab dates and to work on the ground in a lab studio space. Travels to and accommodation in Kuopio will be covered for artists/curators coming from other cities of Finland.
Both labs will be formatted and facilitated by British artist group The Map Consortium and gather together 8 participants in total. A new group of 8 will be formed for each lab.
We offer a fee of 2000€ to each lab participant.
Eligibility
Open to curators and artists from across the disciplines – from all over the world.
For the Kuopio, Finland lab work will take place in synchronisation with Eastern European Summer Time, and for the Reykjavík, Iceland lab work will take place in synchronisation with Greenwich Mean Time. Applicants should consider their availability for working within these timezones when applying.
Applicants should state their availability – and whether they have a preference for particular lab dates.
Applicants can either apply solo or as a pair. We have a particular interest in pairings of art workers that share a geographical location (live in the same city or town) that would like to use this lab to begin a dialogue between them. As such, applicants in pairs are encouraged.
Submitting an Application for Global City Local City Labs
Send your application by using this electric form.
The proposal deadline for all applicants is 13.9.2020 (at 23.59 Finnish/EEST time).
The application form allows for applicants to attach a CV and web links.
Proposals that do not strictly conform to these guidelines will not be considered.
For further information, please contact us before Thursday 10th September to elisa@antifestival.com . We apologize for not being able to react to the questions sent after that. Please read the application guidelines carefully and submit your application.
Global City Local City project is supported by the Nordic Culture of Ministers via the Nordic Culture Point and the Icelandic-Finnish Cultural Foundation.
ANTI Festival 2020 – Food at the centre of life and art
Media release 27.8.2020
The 19th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 27th October and 1st November 2020 in Kuopio, Finland.
“Let’s do the thing that has been so difficult to do this year, let’s gather together. Let’s do that in acknowledgement that many around the world cannot, that we are fortunate that we can and that we’ll value the experience anew as we’ve learnt in so many other parts of lives to not take simple pleasures for granted. Not that ANTI Festival is a simple pleasure, it’s a complicated, intense, rich, and aromatic pleasure for those that prefer a taste of something strikingly unusual,”
Artistic Directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan say.
We have of course designed this festival to take into account everything needed for us all to be safe. Please find our instructions for a safe festival experience here.
Food at the centre of life and art
The 2020 edition of ANTI Festival celebrates Kuopio’s winning nomination as the European Region of Gastronomy 2020-2021 coordinated by ProAgria Eastern Finland, Rural Women’s Advisory Organisation and Savonia University, and the festival theme is food.
Food is personal, private, deeply social, public, political, it speaks to industry, to production, to micro, local, national and international economies and ecologies, it is global, it is domestic. The festival programme takes on food from provocative and unique perspectives. Projects range from the intimate to the communal, we’ll be offered a window into the lives of strangers and be given opportunities to make new friends, we’ll eat together, think together, walk together and be together in ways that perhaps we haven’t for some time now.
Our Artistic Directors reflect further on the programme in their curatorial statement.
We are excited to share some of our lead projects below. For more, go to our 2020 programme page. The full festival programme will be available in September.
Stan’s Cafe (UK): Of All The People In All The World
Every grain of rice represents someone, somewhere. For this beautifully simple performance installation, the artists build a landscape of rice piles counting out political and social realities, here in Kuopio and around the world: climate protesters, Black Lives Matter demonstrators, farmers in Finland now and 100 years ago, the people who attended the Kuopio SATOA food festival, nurses in Finland, people who have walked on the moon.
Ana Vijdea & Cosmin Nicoară (RO): DINNERS
Eight diverse families from Syracuse, New York, let us join the intimate moments of their dinner time through an immersive video experience. The unique capacity of 360-degree VR filming allows us to take a “place at the table” where so much of the inner workings of family life are revealed.
Reality Research Center & Samuli Laine (FI): Nurture
Nurture is a one-to-one performance where the artist investigates the politics of gender, nurturing and coexistence through the act of breastfeeding. The work is produced by the Helsinki based Reality Research Center and is the 2020 project of their Residency Program for Impossible Performance (2019-2021).
Pilvi Porkola (FI): Popcorn
Popcorn is a lecture performance and a short party. It is an exploration of popcorn and its materiality as well as a potentiality of this specific material. It is about time we spend making micro popcorn, but also about time we just spend.
READ MORE
Shortlist LIVE!
This year’s festival marks the 2nd edition of Shortlist LIVE! and we’re thrilled to present the four shortlisted artists for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art through a mix of live and remote showings – a unique set of artists and artworks for a unique year.
On Saturday 31st October in Kuopio, we will award ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one of world’s most exciting cultural prize for the 7th time. We will release the Shortlist of the Prize together with the Shortlist LIVE! programme in September.
For more information, please contact Festival Manager Elisa Itkonen: +358 50 305 2005, elisa@antifestival.com
Curatorial Statement 2020
17.8.2020
The world has changed since we last gathered in Kuopio to experience and celebrate ANTI Festival. For much of this year the very act of gathering, of coming together, has never – in our lifetimes – evoked such a complicated set of questions and problems, problems that remain unresolved as we write this in mid-August after many months of looking to the future to see what the future has in store for those that want to come together, from the far corners of the world, to gather in Kuopio.
We began thinking about the theme for this year’s festival some years ago – food, and its associative acts of cooking, eating, growing, farming, providing, the list is long, it is at the centre of life. It is personal, private, deeply social, public, political, it speaks to industry, to production, to micro, local, national and international economies and ecologies, it is global, it is domestic, very often, perhaps always, it is gendered, it has to do with our bodies, how we see each other and how we see ourselves. We know now, more clearly than at any point in human civilisation that if we get food wrong we will bring an end to human civilisation. And we know that when the ability to sit together and eat together, with friends, with family, is taken away from us it signals that something is fundamentally wrong; we want to eat together – it is a human thing to do, it feels good.
When we began thinking about the theme for this year’s festival we had no idea how the things we think about when we think about food would become problematised to the extent they have in 2020. But because it’s difficult to come together doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, and if we can – if it’s safe now, if as artists and audiences we’re willing, if we can work collectively to make it happen then let’s do it, let’s find a way to break bread together in Autumn 2020 for the 19th edition of ANTI Festival.
We can promise you a fantastic festival, one that takes on food (and drink, let’s not forget drink) from surprising, provocative and unique perspectives. Projects range from the intimate to the communal, we’ll be offered a window into the domestic life of strangers and be given opportunities to make new friends, we’ll eat together, think together, walk together and be together in ways that perhaps we haven’t for some time now. And there’ll be excellent coffee. We’ll also be safe; we have of course designed this festival to take into account everything needed to for us all to be safe, at all times.
This year’s festival marks the 2nd edition of Shortlist LIVE and we’re thrilled to present the four shortlisted artists for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art through a mix of live and remote showings – a unique set of artists and artworks for a unique year. Make sure to engage with this extraordinary part of the programme, the prize is always exciting, and the works shortlisted artists share with us are always breath-taking.
So, let’s do the thing that has been so difficult to do this year, let’s gather together. Let’s do that in acknowledgement that many around the world cannot, that we are fortunate that we can and that we’ll value the experience anew as we’ve learnt in so many other parts of lives to not take simple pleasures for granted. Not that ANTI Festival is a simple pleasure, it’s a complicated, intense, rich, and aromatic pleasure for those that prefer a taste of something strikingly unusual.
Johanna Tuukkanen & Gregg Whelan
Artistic Directors
Newsletter 06/2020
#BlackLivesMatter
ANTI Festival is deeply committed to anti-racism work, and in the future, we want communicate better what this means in our activity.
We are constantly evaluating our activity and willing to educate ourselves. Despite we have succeeded in presenting work by (marginalised) artists with diverse backgrounds, we have not succeeded in increasing diversity inside our organisation; we have a completely white staff.
We will continue developing both our communication and other activity, and recommend the “Anti-racism resources” document which has been helpful to us in this work.
FACE to FAITH creating dialogue in the multicultural Europe
ANTI Festival is a part of the FACE to FAITH project (2020-2023) that has been selected to the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. FACE to FAITH is a cooperation project of 7 European (and an Israeli) theatres and festivals. They all share the conviction that performing arts has a significant role in creating dialogue and trust in the multicultural Europe.
The project will start on 1st September 2020, and we will communicate more about it later this year!
Have a good summer – hope to see you in Kuopio in the Autumn!
We are closely monitoring global developments regarding COVID-19. As an international festival our response to the crisis is guided by conditions and restrictions in place across the world. We will review the situation and its effects on event production after the Finnish summer break and will release the new festival dates and details of our 2020 programme in August.
At the moment, we are optimistically working towards a late-autumn festival with numerous artists and partners. We are following the instructions from the authorities and planning for a Corona-safe festival experience.
We thank all our supporters, friends and collaborators for your patience and cooperation during this complicated and unprecedented time!
The ANTI Festival team will have a summer break between 6th and 19th July. Have a good summer!
We hope to see you in Kuopio in the Autumn!
Image above: Mammalian Diving Reflex (CA): Sex, Drugs & Criminality 2019. Photo: Pekka Mäkinen
Newsletter 05/2020
After 8 with @antifestival : Kalle Pulkkinen, Eevi Tolvanen & Marika Räty
ANTI Festival will join the global online cultural community regenerated in social media this spring. As we can’t gather together on the ground we have invited our fascinating friends and colleagues to meet and talk with us online. These informal encounters and discussions will be shared with you – our friends, colleagues and audiences on social media.
After 8 with @antifestival is a series of discussion events on Instagram Live!
Our guests will discuss topics that are important for them at this unprecedented time. The series is also inspired by the 2020 festival theme, food.
After 8 with @antifestival #2 will take place on Thursday June 4th at 8 pm. with Kalle Pulkkinen, Eevi Tolvanen and Marika Räty.
Kalle Pulkkinen and Eevi Tolvanen are artists based in the Eastern Finland. Marika Räty is the Regional Artist of Performance Arts in the Arts Promotion Centre Finland.
The event is organised in cooperation with The Regional Dance Centre of Eastern Finland and Performance Days supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland. The After 8 series is organised in the framework of Future DiverCities project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
The discussion will be in Finnish. Stay tuned for English discussions later in the year!
Future DiverCities – Building a future city where all voices are heard
This year is the final activity year of the Future DiverCities – Creativity in an Urban Context project (2016-2020). Future DiverCities is an initiative of 9 cultural partners in Europe and Canada funded by the Creative Europe Programme. ANTI Festival and Savonia University of Applied Sciences are the Finnish partners in the project. The project is coordinated by Savonia.
During the Future DiverCities project ANTI Festival has realised, among other events and projects, experimental artist laboratories, Labs. For ANTI, developing artists, art and the city are indeed the most important objectives of the project. At the core of the project is urban city space, its cultural diversity and all the voices in the city.
Through the Labs and other project activities, we want to bring art close to the people of Kuopio and invite them to join together in making the city an even more vibrant European city where all voices are heard.
ANTI Festival hosted the fourth Future DiverCities Lab in Kuopio between 2nd and 15th September 2019. The Lab was based in an urban room – a pop-up space in the centre of the town – which was open to all people to meet, make and discuss.
The 2019 Lab artists were Kattrin Deufert (DE), Kim Modig (FI), Lara Thoms (AU), Martin Finnland (AT) and Sven Kerck (AT). The Lab was hosted by ANTI in partnership with creative facilitators of The Map Consortium (UK) and artists local to Kuopio; Veera Launonen and Lauri Hei.
Best moments of the Lab 2019 in this short video:
After 8 with @antifestival on Instagram Live!
Media release 20.5.2020
ANTI Festival will join the global online cultural community regenerated in social media this spring. As we can’t gather together on the ground we have invited our fascinating friends and colleagues to meet and talk with us online. These informal encounters and discussions will be shared with you – our friends, colleagues and audiences on social media.
After 8 with @antifestival is a series of discussion events on Instagram Live!
Our guests will discuss topics that are important for them at this unprecedented time. The series is also inspired by the 2020 festival theme, food.
After 8 with @antifestival will take place on Thursday May 28that 8 pm. with Kim Modig and Johanna Tuukkanen. Kim Modig is a Helsinki based artist and part of the sound art duo Biitsi. Johanna Tuukkanen is a dance artist and curator working as the Artistic Director of ANTI Festival.
This discussion will be in Finnish but stay tuned for English discussions later in the year!
The After 8 series is organised in the framework of Future DiverCities project.
Coming up!
Thursday May 28th at 8 pm. (FI time)
After 8 with @antifestival : Kim Modig & Johanna Tuukkanen
Thursday June 4th at 8 pm. (FI time)
After 8 with @antifestival : Kalle Pulkkinen & Eevi Tolvanen & Marika Räty
ANTI Festival moving to late Autumn
Media release 29.4.2020
Like every organisation we are closely monitoring global developments regarding COVID-19. As an international festival our response to the crisis is guided by conditions and restrictions in place across the world; it is clear, from all sides, that the 2020 edition of ANTI Festival, usually presented in early September, should be moved further into the autumn season. We are carefully following these changeable circumstances and will release new festival dates, and details of our 2020 programme, after the Finnish summer break.
“Producing an international arts festival requires the ability to look ahead with a degree of certainty, which of course we currently can’t do. ANTI is supported with public and private funds, funds that we want to use sustainably and responsibly and without financial or social risk. Nothing is certain at the moment but, hopefully, we will all be a little wiser after the summer,” says ANTI Festival Manager Elisa Itkonen.
Despite present challenges, the ANTI Festival team is working towards a late-autumn festival with numerous artists and partners. We thank all our supporters, friends and collaborators for your patience during this complicated and unprecedented time. We will notify you as soon as we can if any changes affect your engagement with us.
More than ever we are proud to work in our sector and more than ever we realise the importance of supporting artists and the arts. We wish our partners and audiences all the best during these challenging times.
You may hear from us through our social media channels already in the spring – stay tuned especially on Instagram and Facebook!
For more information, contact Festival Manager Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival.com, +358 50 305 2005.
Coronavirus’ effects on our activities
17.3.2020
Like many organisations and events we are closely monitoring global developments regarding Coronavirus.
It may become necessary to delay ANTI Festival and/or rethink our programming of the festival to reflect Finnishand international travel restrictions and advice. We are carefully following this changeable issue and will make a decision on the festival’s timing and its programme in the next weeks.
Will we notify your as soon as we can if any changes effect your engagement with us.
We of course appreciate your patience on this complicated and unpredictable issue.
All the best for the challenging times!
For more information, contact Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival.com, +358 50 305 2005!
Newsletter 2/2020
A sculpture buried by ANTI Festival to be removed from its grave – welcome to take your own piece of Artefact!
An Impossible Performance Examines Coexistence and Relations of Codependency
New multiannual cooperation agreement with the City of Kuopio
A sculpture buried by ANTI Festival to be removed from its grave – welcome to take your own piece of Artefact!
In 2016, the Australian artists Willoh S Weiland and JR Brennan created the unforgettable production Artefact, performed with hundreds of local participants in Kuopio, Finland. The work was being edited into a remarkable film that was screened in the 2017 programmes of ANTI Festival and Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
As a part of the Artefact performance we buried a 12 tonne stone into a wasteland of Kuopio. The Artefact saga will continue next week as the stone has to be removed due to a building project in the area.
We now invite the participants of the Artefact project as well as other audiences to the grave of the Artefact to witness the stone coming up and disappearing again. For technical reasons we will crush the stone into pieces and bury it into another location.
Welcome on Wednesday 11th March at 4 pm.
Address: “Technopolis park”, Savilahdentie 4, Kuopio, Finland
An Impossible Performance Examines Coexistence and
Relations of Codependency
Samuli Laine’s Nurture has been selected to the Reality Research Center’s Residency Program for Impossible Performance. Nurture will premiere at ANTI Festival between 8th and 13th September 2020.
Nurture is a one-on-one performance where Samuli Laine investigates the politics of gender, nurturing and coexistence through the act of breastfeeding. The performance emerged from a desire to suggest new perspectives softly and tenderly and study nurturing as a radical driver of change.
Nurture will create a space for a delicate encounter that deconstructs the traditionally gendered practice of breastfeeding. In the performance, Samuli Laine nurses the spectator-experiencer. This event will create a temporary bond between two people and provide a space where social norms can change. Nurture reaches towards an alternate state of being and invites the experiencer to daydream. At the same time, the performance challenges the standardized gender and body related expectations for breastfeeding.
Image above: Samuli Laine
New multiannual cooperation agreement with the City of Kuopio
Our Chair of Board Jenni Rissanen and Artistic Director Johanna Tuukkanen met in February to sign, from our side, a multiannual cooperation agreement with the City of Kuopio for the years 2020-2022! Thank you, City of Kuopio!
A sculpture buried by ANTI Festival to be removed from its grave – welcome to take your own piece of Artefact!
Media release 5.3.2020
In 2016, the Australian artists Willoh S Weiland and JR Brennan created the unforgettable production Artefact, performed with hundreds of local participants in Kuopio, Finland. The work was being edited into a remarkable film that was screened in the 2017 programmes of ANTI Festival and Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne.
As a part of the Artefact performance we buried a 12 tonne stone into a wasteland of Kuopio. The Artefact saga will continue next week as the stone has to be removed due to a building project in the area.
We now invite the participants of the Artefact project as well as other audiences to the grave of the Artefact to witness the stone coming up and disappearing again. For technical reasons we will crush the stone into pieces and bury it into another location.
Welcome on Wednesday 11th March at 4 pm.
Address: “Technopolis park”, Savilahdentie 4, Kuopio, Finland
For more information: Elisa Itkonen, elisa@antifestival.com, +358 50 305 2005
Artefact 2016
Artefact by Willoh S Weiland and JR Brennan was a funeral for obsolete technology. It commemorated the mysterious phenomenon of brand disappearance from Blackberry, to Nokia. It was a tribute to the immortal consumer icons we have internationally adored and the intimate and fickle ways we worship them. It farewelled the products that have formed us with performance, sound, documentary and pathos.
Created with the community of Kuopio and featured some of its best loved choirs, death metal singers and a living timeline of children to senior citizen – Artefact was an invitation to the city to celebrate the relationships they have with their own magical artefacts.
Willoh S Weiland is the 2015 winner of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, and Artefact was a commissioned work of the Prize.