Live Art Prize Nominees Compete for 30 000€
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival 2019 builds up to a thrilling weekend as the nominees for The ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art present their work in Kuopio Finland as part of the new Shortlist LIVE! programme. The new Shortlist LIVE! concept change the way the winner selection process is handled, but also provides all four nominees a stage to show their work during ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival as a paid performance. All the performances are open to public without an entrance fee.
The nominees for the 2019 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and their presentations are: Cuqui Jerez (ES): The Phenomenon of Fictitious Forces, Dana Michel (CA): Mercurial George, Keijaun Thomas (US): My Last American Dollar and Mammalian Diving Reflex (CA): Sex, Drugs and Criminality. The nominee performances are presented at ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival during Friday 13th September and Saturday 14th September. The winner will be nominated on Saturday 14th September 2019.
The winner of the prize is selected by an international jury. The three-person jury’s chair is internationally acclaimed author Saara Turunen (FI) and the other members are experienced artistic director and cultural leader Daniel Brine (UK) and celebrated professor, academic and artist Thomas F. DeFrantz (US).
Friday 13.9. 21.30
Konepaja | Pohjolankatu 1, Kuopio
He was explaining his obsession with gravity to me and then he opened the book and read something like this: The secret of flying is the following: you have to do it immediately, before your body realizes it is defying the laws. He closed the book, threw it out of the window and carried on talking. It fell so fast that I didn’t have time to see what book it was. At that point a phrase from Rayuela came to mind: I’m not sleepy. I keep on seeing things in the air while you talk.
In this piece more than 10.000 objects fly entering the stage. That’s it!
Saturday 14.9. 14.00
Sotku teatteri | Suokatu 42, Kuopio
In the wake of the acclaimed Yellow Towel, Mercurial George traces and transforms the banal, provoking a certain malaise. Sifting through the heaps of dusty clues leftover in the wake of initializing a cultural excavation, Dana Michel offers a destabilizing solo. The body vacillates as it struggles for balance and a toehold. Stretching out time with minimalist and deconstructed movement, Michel becomes the archeologist of her own persona.
“I only just got a bit of dirt under the nails with the last thing. Now wading through the hairy rubble of a preliminary anthropological dig. So much debris! I couldn’t have predicted how much debris there would be and how much work I had created for myself in waking this beast. But they needed waking. I have seen the eyes and I’m circling, skipping, daintily lifting limbs and sniffing its scent. What is the smell of a plethora of someones that you have been avoiding your whole life? What do you do with the body? This is another science experiment. This is another ground on which to test skins that belong to me, outfits and ideas that may or may not have been imposed.” –Dana Michel
RESERVE YOUR SEAT
Saturday 14.9. 17.00
Konepaja | Pohjolankatu 1, Kuopio
In Keijaun Thomas’ immersive solo work, My Last American Dollar:
Round 1. Tricking and Flipping Coins: Making Dollars Hit,
Round 2. Black Angels in the Infield: Dripping Faggot Sweat,
Round 3. Whatchu Gonna Do: Marvelous like Marva.
Thomas investigates and embodies resistance, asking: “How do we resist temptation, how do we slow down, how do we play, how do we survive?” Thomas traverses a multimedia installation, combining structural fragments of environments associated with labor, ritual, and hospitality such as locker rooms, strip clubs, waiting rooms, church pews, and field days. Investigating forms through which black and brown people hold space for each other, Thomas ask, how to carry the multiplicities of being young, gifted, and black. Powerfully engaging with the entangled histories of labor, subjugation, and resistance.
RESERVE YOUR SEAT
Friday 13.9. 19.00
Kultttuuriareena 44 | Kauppakatu 44, Kuopio
Sex, Drugs and Criminality collides teenagers with the most famous and courageous artists in the world. The teens are invited to ask the artists any questions they want; the artists are invited to refuse any questions they want. The two groups reach across the yawning and gaping intergenerational chasm, to see if they can connect even just the tips of their fingers and, together, have a very very very frank discussion about three of the most confusing topics in the universe: sex, drugs and criminality.