2018

ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival
25.-30.9.2018

The 17th edition of ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. Internationally celebrated, award-winning artists from around the world will present projects engaged with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.

A playful engagement with the spaces of Kuopio, ANTI Festival’s host city, has been at the heart of our approach to bringing vital, exciting and surprising contemporary art to this inquisitive community. For 2018 we’re focusing our attentions properly on play and gaming.

Artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan are excited about the festival theme:

"Play and games, in forms as divergent as any other realm of human activity, sit at the heart of the contemporary experience. Games are in our pockets, on our screens, in our bodies, they are played in and on the city, the landscape, the sea, the globe. Games and play have become a way – an active way - of understanding the world and each other."

During the festival week, we will award ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one of world’s most exciting cultural prizes. We’ll also host the third Future DiverCities Lab in Kuopio.

Download ANTI Festival Programme 2018 (pdf)!

ANTI pop-up play space & info

Tuesday 25.9. 11.00 – 18.00
Wednesday 26.9. – Friday 28.9. 10.00 – 18.00
Saturday 29.9. 10.00 – 17.00
Hallikatu Street 14

ANTI pop-up play space is a playing space and festival info. Visit us to ask for more information, get the programme prints and ANTIZINE’s, book seats to performances, spend time with us – and play!

We have invited a number of artists to present and facilitate their innovative and exciting games in the space. Read more ▸

Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey (AU): Pivot

Tuesday 25.9. – Friday 28.9. 11:00 – 17:00
Saturday 29.9. 10:00 – 16:00
Park next to the Kuopio City Hall | Tulliportinkatu Street 31

A field of semi intelligent seesaws

Rejoice in the safe absurdity of a see saw ride, while our democracy teeters towards ever more dangerous farce. As you enjoy the rare opportunity to ride, speak, and listen, remember that Pivot is programmed to consider all words it hears, and is reflecting your own views, and the views of many others. Read more ▸

Action Hero (UK): Oh Europa

Tuesday 25.9. 13:00 – 17:00
Wednesday 26.9. – Thursday 27.9. 12:00 – 16:00
Friday 28.9. 18:00 – 22:00
Saturday 29.9. 11:00 – 13:00

Kuopio Market Square

Over 6 months in 2018, Action Hero are travelling over 30,000km across Europe in a motorhome, recording songs of love, hope, heartbreak, loss and desire, sung by the people they meet. They invite ANTI Festival and the people of Kuopio to contribute to the process by recording love songs in their mobile studio and by encountering material gathered on their journey through Europe’s contested identity. Read more ▸

Meetlab (HU): TRON

Tuesday 25.9. – Wednesday 26.9. 18:00 – 21:00
Ylä-Pyörö school yard | Blominkatu Street 2 (Petonen district)

Thursday 27.9. 18:00 – 22:00
Koljonniemenkatu Street 3

Friday 28.9. 18:00 – 24:00
Koljonniemenkatu Street 3

Saturday 29.9. 18:00 – 22:00
Koljonniemenkatu Street 3

We invite people of Kuopio to play TRON, the legendary and simple one-on-one video game, laser projected on a wall of a building. TRON takes us back in time to the creation of our first video games. Let’s play, cheer and challenge the winners all night long! Read more ▸

Sanna From & Riina Hannuksela (FI): I Love Me Lunch Play

Tuesday 25.9. – Friday 28.9. 12:00 – 13:00
Mobile | Participant’s current location

“This game will solve all the problems you might have in your life.”

The main goal of I Love Me Lunch Play is to get new perspectives on your everyday life. You can play this game in your everyday surroundings, inside or outside, in institutions, work places, schools, malls, parks, yards, streets etc. Read more ▸

Tania El Khoury (LB): As Far As My Fingertips Take Me

Wednesday 26.9. 15.00 – 17.00 & 18.00 – 20.00
Thursday 27.9. 15.00 – 17.00 & 18.00 – 20.00
Friday 28.9. 13.00 – 15.00 & 16.00 – 18.00
M/S Queen R | Kuopio Harbour | Kauppakatu Street 1

One audience member every 10 minutes, book your seat: booking@antifestival.com!

The internationally renowned one-to-one performance comes to Kuopio.

As Far As My Fingertips Take Me is an encounter through a gallery wall between an audience member and a refugee. Read more ▸

Wrestling Club workshops

Wrestling Club is a workshop and performance by Anna Maria Häkkinen, Lotta Suomi and Emil Uuttu, presented at ANTI Festival 2018. The Wrestling Club workshop aims to prepare participants’ bodies for the performance. The workshop centers around consent, security, power relations and contact. Read more ▸

Future DiverCities Lab #3 – Public Sharing

Wednesday 26.9. 17.00
Community centre Pinari | Pyörönkaari 19

PIE.
RAIN.
MONEY.
WALKING.

LET’S MAKE HISTORY! 5 O’CLOCK, PINARI PETONEN.

The pie is free, AND we will PAY YOU 5 euro to hand in your phone and join us for a stroll in the rain! Read more ▸

Artist Talk with 2018 Shortlisted for Live Art Prize, Helsinki

Thursday 27.9. 17.00
Publics | Sturenkatu Street 37-41 4B) Helsinki

Welcome to meet with the 2018 shortlisted artists for ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art! All The Queens Men (Australia), Nic Green (United Kingdom), Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands) and Sonya Lindfors (Finland) will present their work and discuss with Publics’ artistic director Paul O’Neill and the audience.

The event is organised in collaboration with Publics. Read more ▸

John Court (FI/UK) & Mark Harvey (NZ): Drop Kick

Friday 28.9. 10.00 – 16.00
Snellmanin puisto Park

Saturday 29.9. 10.00 – 16.00
Kuopio Market Square & streets around

Drop Kickwill involve playful endurance/durational actions performed by John Court and Mark Harvey together with apparatuses that they develop in workshops with local youth through a process of guided collaboration. Notions of play will be explored through a sense of free-association in the development of these large objects with participants and the way in which Court and Harvey choose to respond to them through their actions. Read more ▸

How do we talk about games?

Thursday 27.9. 18.00
Restaurant Malja | Kauppakatu Street 29

Discussion and network meeting

How do we talk about games (in Finland)? What kind of conceptions do we have of video and mobile game-playing? How is gaming used in our everyday life and, for example, in arts? How could we benefit more from gaming in different social fields? How could we create operational models and communities through gaming?

We have invited specialists on games and gaming from different contexts to discuss these questions. After the panel discussion we will continue with informal networking! Read more ▸

Anna Maria Häkkinen, Lotta Suomi, Emil Uuttu (FI): Wrestling Club

Friday 28.9. 19.00 – 21.00
Saturday 29.9. 18.00 – 20.00
Element Studio Maaherrankatu Street 21

The Wrestling Club is a workshop and performance installation. The artists gather to wrestle with local workshop participants to prepare participants’ bodies for the performance. Audiences are invited to follow the pre-written but unrehearsed performance, featuring a loud bass-driven DJ set, and feeling the bodily experience of wrestlers in their own bodies. Read more ▸

Tania El Khoury (LB): The Search for Power

Friday 28.9. 19.00
Saturday 29.9. 19.00
Railway workshop | Pohjolankatu Street 1

Fully booked!

Installation performance by Tania El Khoury in collaboration with Ziad Abu-Rish.

On a night with a sudden electricity outage in their Beirut neighbourhood, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the artist had grown up with the understanding that the problem with electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled electricity outages across the city of Beirut. Read more ▸

Becker (NO), Goldberg (SE) & Langgård (NO): Still Life

Saturday 29.9. 12:00 & 14:00
Sunday 30.9. 15:00
St John’s Church | Ampujanpolku Street 2

A site-specific performance installation by Signe Becker, Rosalind Goldberg and Ingvild Langgård.

In Still Life, scenography, choreography and sound together create an ever changing tableau. The scenery first seems frozen and arrayed. In the course of time, it will grow and morph into living, three dimensional images with sound – constantly changing shape and meaning. Still Life is as much of a concert as a performance: the scenography and sound will be choreographed, the dancers will turn into scenography and the sound will be dancing. Read more ▸

Artist Talk with 2018 Shortlisted for Live Art Prize

Saturday 29.9. 14.00
Gallery Ars Libera | Suokatu Street 30, Kuopio

Welcome to meet the 2018 shortlisted artists for the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art! All The Queens Men (Australia), N ic Green (United Kingdom), Jeanne van Heeswijk (Netherlands) and Sonya Lindfors (Finland) will present their work and discuss with ANTI Festival’s artistic directors Gregg Whelan and Johanna Tuukkanen as well as with the audience ! Read more ▸

ANTI Prize Party 2018

Saturday 29.9. 21.00-24.00
Restaurant Panza | Ajurinkatu Street 26

We announce the 2018 winner of ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art in a video event that will be screened in a live event in Kuopio. At the same time, ANTI Prize Party is the festival club you don’t want to miss!

Featuring a show by a New York based singer, musician, writer and artist Joseph Keckler, hailed by the New York Times as ”major vocal talent whose range shatters the conventional boundaries”. Read more ▸

Theatre of Research (DE): Playing Up

Friday 28.9. – Saturday 29.9. 11.00 – 17.00
ANTI pop-up play space | Hallikatu Street 14

Make clothes out of food, lie on top of cars, dance with animals, have a ketchup fight, follow a random passerby, invent your own form of sport, search for miracles. Drawing on key Live Art themes and seminal works, PLAYING UP takes the form of a game
played by adults and kids together. Read more ▸

Richard DeDomenici (UK): The Swivelympics

Saturday 29.9. 10:00 – 15:00
ANTI pop-up play space | Hallikatu 14

Welcome to The Swivelympics – your chance to achieve international sporting greatness without standing up!

The aim of Swivelympics – other than world peace and human understanding – is to complete the most number of spins in
one self-propelled push in a standard office swivel chair. Read more ▸

Hai Art, Antye Greie-Ripatti (DE/FI), Juan Duarte Regino (MX) & Eerika Jalasaho (FI): Sound Map Kuopio

Tuesday 25.9. – Sunday 30.9.
Mobile application & ANTI pop-up play space, Hallikatu Street 14

Tuesday 25.9. 16.00 – 18.00
Meet with the Artist Eerika Jalasaho (FI)!

A new field-recording sound app for smart devices for the city Kuopio will be launched at this year’s ANTI Festival. Sound Map Kuopio captures sounds of Kuopio in an imaginative, participatory way and ask questions such as which sound do you connect with the city of Kuopio? Which sound belongs to Kuopio, whether you love it or not? Read more ▸

point and place (UK etc): Hexagons

Tuesday 25.9. – Saturday 29.9.
ANTI pop-up play space | Hallikatu Street 14

Hexagons is a game created by the artist collective point and place, exploring landscape, the body and acts of communication. Drawing on an archive of images created over 10 years of collaborative practice, the game is made of 33 paired images, printed on beautifully crafted hexagonal pieces. An invitation to play and explore, Hexagonscan be played as the traditional memory game ‘Pelmanism’ or used as a starting point for creative interaction and improvised play. Read more ▸

Future DiverCities Lab #3

21.-27.9.2018
Community Center Pinari | Pyörönkaari Street 19

ANTI Festival will host the third Future DiverCities Lab in Kuopio before and during the festival!

In the Lab, artists from different artistic backgrounds and around the globe work together in the frame work of the Future DiverCities project, in relation to each other, the local environment and community, sharing practices and engaging members of the community in artistic interventions.
Read more ▸

ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival25.-30.9.2018