Jury and Shortlist announced for world’s only International Prize for Live Art
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 55th edition of the Bienniale, together with Manuel Pelmus), Tate Modern, 9th Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 10, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, the 12th 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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