30/8/2007
Anti
Different venues, Kuopio
Festival. Contemporary art of all fields from sculpture and environmental art to dance, live art and performance within Kuopio city spaces. Site-specific time based works take place in preselected locations around the city centre. It is the only international festival that presents some of the latest development in performing arts and artists that traverse the borders of conventional subdivisions in art within a city environment.
Contemporary Art Festival
Curated by Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival presents contemporary art of all fields from sculpture and environmental art to dance, live art and performance within Kuopio city spaces. Site-specific time based works take place in preselected locations around the city centre.
The concept of ANTI is unique in the Finnish art scene. It is the only international festival that presents some of the latest development in performing arts and artists that traverse the borders of conventional subdivisions in art within a city environment. ANTI offers an opportunity for both Finnish and international artists to work outside the so-called traditional art context.
ANTI is free of charge except for the seminar and artworks can easily be reached by foot.
The programme will consist of artworks created by invited artists and artists selected by proposals.
An international festival presenting site-specific works made for public space.
Over the final weekend of September a small city in eastern Finland plays host to the world’s only contemporary art festival presenting solely site-specific works commissioned for public space. This unique event has attracted over 30,000 visitors since its inception in 2002, gaining a truly international reputation as a meeting place for artists and audiences fascinated by how contemporary art might respond to the spaces and places of everyday life. Surrounded by lakes and forests Kuopio is a stunning festival location offering a unique setting for a programme of works by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists.
With an emphasis on performance ANTI has established itself as Finland’s foremost presenter of Live Art while also showcasing new developments in sonic and visual arts. In 2006 the festival achieved national recognition as the Minister of Culture awarded the Artistic Directors of ANTI with the State Prize for the Art in recognition of their contribution to the Finnish arts scene and in 2007 the internationally acclaimed artist and writer Gregg Whelan joined Johanna Tuukkanen as Co-Artistic Director.
All works presented at ANTI are commissioned for public space; each year a selection of locations are presented to artists who are asked to respond to one or more of the sites.
ANTI 2007
For the 2007 edition of the festival a community college, a skateboarding park, the pages of a city newspaper, a late-night grill, a children’s playground and an entire island will be negotiated by an international program of artists. Additional works will roam the city, to be encountered by chance. Such a piece will be UK artist Claire Blundell-Jones’ Introducing Tumbleweeds To the Finnish Landscape where in a playful evocation of the mythological spaces of the American West the artist, equipped with a hand-held industrial leaf-blower, will blow tumbleweeds through Kuopio’s streets and avenues, a sight similar to that of a person leading their pet through the familiar terrain of their own neighbourhood.
Another project will see Australian artist Rosie Dennis negotiate both Kuopio’s Cooperative Bank and the complexities of the Finnish language in the internationally acclaimed performance piece Access All Areas. Here Dennis, dealing with themes of work and the toll it may take on one’s personal constitution falls in and out of looping bi-lingual texts and movement fragments, creating a space equally charged and comic – the artist somehow trapped in a world of work where ‘everything resonates on a Monday’.
The internationally renowned artist Aaron Williamson (UK) will literally give voice to Vasikkasaari Island. Williamson will covertly call from the island to the mainland, tempting some kind of exchange. Hidden on the island Williamson, a little like a ventriloquist, will create the impression that the island has developed the ability to speak. As an idea it is resonant with Williamson’s profound deafness and with wider ideas of language, communication and geographic exchange.
Other works include Davida Hewlett (UK) writing and performing a song about Kuopio and its citizens in collaboration with legendary Finnish band Cosmo Jones Beat Machine; Satu Palokangas (FI) will offer audiences their chance to pick a dance piece from the altered menu of a Kuopio’s favourite grill; and spectacularly Rebekah Rousi (AU/FI) will try to enter the Guinness Book of Records with the longest PowerPoint presentation the world has ever seen.
Visiting each project during the festival is easily done on foot and each piece is entirely free to experience, ANTI is an un-ticketed festival in keeping with its commitment to presenting innovative art works to a wide public audience.
ANTI Seminar – Body/Site/Gender
On Thursday September 27 ANTI will organize a seminar Body/ Site/Gender with contributions from art historian Jennie Klein (Univerity of Ohio, USA) researcher Juha-Heikki Tihinen (FI) and artist Leena Rouhiainen (FI). In addition festival artists, Rosie Dennis (AU), Simon Whitehead (UK) and Satu Palokangas (FI) will give artist’s statements.
ANTI Publication
ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival's Development and Training project published a book, ANTI Contemporary Art Festival 2002-2006 – Time-Based and Site-Specific Contemporary Art in Kuopio, and a DVD documenting the first five years of this unique festival. Looking through the publication the festival’s extraordinary breadth is immediately apparent, so too is the intelligence and playfullness of the works presented. The publication and the DVD are available from the festival office.
ANTI 2007 should prove to be another unique year for this unique festival. We hope you’ll join us!
Different venues
Kuopio