ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is thrilled to present the four shortlisted artists for the 2020 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and their performances in the Shortlist LIVE! Programme – a unique set of artists and artworks for a unique year.
The nominees for the 2020 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live are: Geumhyung Jeong (South Korea), W A U H A U S (Finland), Ingri Fiksdal (Norway) and Brian Fuata (Australia).
This year’s ANTI Festival marks the 2nd edition of Shortlist LIVE! and the nominees’ performances are presented through a mix of live, digital and remote showings during the festival taking place in Kuopio, Finland between 27th October and 1st November 2020.
Shortlist 2020
Geumhyung Jeong (KR)
South Korea-born artist Geumhyung Jeong is a choreographer and performance artist whose practice began in the theatre and has extended to encompass installation and film. In her work, she constantly negotiates the relationship between the human body and the things surrounding it.
She has been invited to exhibit her works worldwide, including at the 9th Asia-Pacific-Triennial in Brisbane, ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels, and her solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel. In 2014 she received the Zücher Kantonalbank Acknowledgement Prize of Zürcher Theater Spektakel and in 2015 she was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Art Prize.
W A U H A U S (FI)
W A U H A U S is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary arts collective that was formed in 2016. The collective creates contemporary theatre, performance art, and dance productions, as well as social choreography, lectures and workshops. The works of W A U H A U S are situated between different genres of art and take place at various venues from small black box theatres to urban sites, large stadiums, and the main stages of established theatre houses.
The members of W A U H A U S are scenographer Laura Haapakangas, director Anni Klein, scenographer Samuli Laine, sound designer Jussi Matikainen, choreographer Jarkko Partanen, new media artist Jani-Matti Salo and sound designer Heidi Soidinsalo.
W A U H A U S is known for their comprehensive audiovisual stage aesthetics and methods of shared authorship. The collective collaborates with other artists and institutions both in Finland and abroad.
INgri fiksdal (No)
Ingri Midgard Fiksdal is a choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. In 2019, she finished a PhD in artistic research at Oslo National Academy of the Arts titled “Affective Choreographies”. This research took shape as six performances and three books. Ingri’s work on affect has in recent years taken her into discourses on perspective and privilege. She is currently working on a number of projects addressing the intersection between the post-anthropocentric and the decolonial from a feminist perspective. Ingri is concerned with how practise and theory are entangled in her work in a way where neither is perceived as anterior to the other.
Ingri’s work has in recent years been performed at Kunstenfestival in Brussels, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Santarcangelo Festival, Beijing Contemporary Dance Festival, Sommerszene in Salzburg, Reykjavík Art Museum, brut Wien, Teatro di Roma, Harbourfront Centre Toronto, Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, BUDA Kortrijk, Tanzhaus NRW in Dusseldorf and Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, alongside extensive touring in Norway.
Brian Fuata (AU)
Brian Fuata works in the improvisation of performance and objects employing the image of the ghost as a structural device. His live works are in situ timed pieces that vary in period blocks. They integrate multiple genres and registers of performance and public speaking, to engage a new narrative that he makes in/of each site incorporating his material surrounds as potential subject matter.
Parallel to his live works, Brian's email performances divide and categorise his contacts into participants and audience members. He composes a performative email directly To a person or group of people, creating an audience in the Bcc field who become witness to their correspondence. These virtual performances transcend the private nature of digital communication.
Selected presentations include: Five Columns, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2020), Apparitional Charlatan ~ Minor Appearances, Biennale of Sydney, various locations in Sydney (2020); Care disfigurements (flowers), 4A Gallery Sydney for Hong Kong Art Fair, Hong Kong (2019); Broadloom, Murray Art Museum Albury (2019); IWMLDFS (or MINIBAR), Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2019); The Guest House, Gwangju Biennial, South Korea (2018); All Nothing, Poetry Project, New York (2015); All titles, PERFORMA New York (2015); Untitled (a refit of the sheet), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015); Points of Departure 1-3, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2014).
Shortlist LIVE! 2020
Geumhyung Jeong (KR): HOMEMADE RC TOY
Geumhyung Jeong (KR): HOMEMADE RC TOY
In Homemade RC Toy Geumhyung Jeong creates choreographic assemblages with self-made robotic sculptures.
In a series of intimate live encounters and sensual interaction with her homemade partners, she uses her body to communicate with them. Moving between moments of connection and disconnection, she incites the question: Who is driving the action? The human or the machine?
At the dawn of a technologically endorsed future, “Homemade RC Toy” is both a curious, mechanical ballet and an invigorating sexual fantasy that explores the ever-shifting boundaries of the animate and inanimate in the age of the cyborg.
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/geumhyung-jeong-kr-homemade-rc-toy/
W A U H A U S (FI): Flashdance
When we stare at darkness, we struggle to understand what we see and what we think we see. Background and foreground begin to blend. When our perception is limited our minds begin to wander, and the unknown occupies more and more space.
Flashdance is a performance where darkness materializes into sculptural landscapes and forms impossible for the human body. The audience is faced with their limited ability to see and the boundless terrain of their imagination.
In our society where illumination inevitably creates more and more self-control and light penetrates everything, darkness can open open up a path to not-knowing. From the outside, we cannot know what the inside is like, and standing in the light, we cannot see into the darkness.
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/w-a-u-h-a-u-s-fi-flashdance/
INgri fiksdal & fredrik floen (NO): Spectral
Spectral takes shape as a choreographic exploration of a staged and moving landscape of different organisms and things. Within this multitude of human and non-human bodies, a series of micro-movements can be experienced, and the configuration deforms and changes over the time. The viewer experiences a concentrated, moving, breathing, pulsating, growing ecosystem, which blurs the boundaries between the different materialities.
This emerging performative ecosystem is inspired by molluscs, tardigrades, the sci-fi literature of Nnedi Okarofor, jungles, damp basements, the Annihilation alien, garbage dumps, visual artist Pierre Huyghe, kidney stones, Mandelbrot fractals and much more!
In Kuopio - due to traveling challenges caused by the global pandemic - we present a screening of the Spectral film shot during a live performance in Oslo, Norway, in September 2020.
Schedules and seat reservation: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/ingri-fiksdal-no…loen-no-spectral/
Brian Fuata (AU): APPARITIONAL KEYNOTE LECTURE
Apparitional Keynote Lecture, is a ghost lecture-performance that speculates on the future we are moving toward: a moment to gather together and collectively imagine what's next.
The work is based on Brian Fuata’s structured ghost improvisation. A capital element of Fuata's practice is one of absorbency allowing what artist and the Mother of House of Slé, Bhenji Ra notes as being one that reads the room, from which the constituent actors of a given site or context are reconfigured into an open text of poesis, sense, non-sense, and emotion.
In Apparitional Keynote Lecture, Fuata will bear witness to all Liveworks Festival’s works: filtering the dreams, speculations, disruption and propositions presented over the five days of Liveworks through the unique lens of his artistic practice.
Due to the current mobility challenges, caused by the global pandemic, Brian Fuata’s Shortlist LIVE! presentation will be experienced at the Liveworks Festival, Sydney, Australia. In Kuopio, we will present his practice in a film screening event.
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/brian-fuata-au-apparitional-keynote-lecture-2/
JURY 2020
kira o’reilly (iE/FI)
The Chair of Jury 2020 is Kira O’Reilly, an Irish visual artist based in Helsinki.
Her practice, both willfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined employs performance, installation, biotechnical practices and writing with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body.
She makes, writes, teaches, mentors and collaborates with humans of various types and technologies and non-humans of numerous divergencesincluding mosses, spiders, the sun, pigs, cell cultures, horses, micro-organisms, copper, salt, piss, blood, bicycles, rivers, landscapes, tundras, rocks, trees, shoes, food, books, air, moon and ravens.
Her first ever visit to Finland was at the invitation of ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, 2003.
JOÃO LAIA (PT/FI)
João Laia is the chief curator for exhibitions at Kiasma – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki.
Recent projectsinclude Máscaras (Masks) co-curated with Valentinas Klimašauskas and 10000 Years Later Between Venus and Mars (2017-18) at Oporto City Hall Gallery, In Free Fall (2019) at CaixaForum, Barcelona, Vanishing Point (2019) at Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon, Drowning in a Sea of Data (2019) and Transmissions from the Etherspace (2017) at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, foreign bodies (2018) at P420, Bologna, H Y P E R C O N N E C T E D (2016) at MMOMA – Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Hybridize or Disappear (2015) at MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon.
Together with Klimašauskas, Laia is co-curating the 14th Baltic Triennial at the CAC in Vilnius. (2021).
fiona winning (au)
Fiona Winning has worked across contemporary performance, theatre, dance and festivals. She is currently Director, Programming at Sydney Opera House and prior to that was Head of Programming at Sydney Festival 2012-17.
Fiona has worked as a dramaturge and producer in contemporary arts, curating the Australian Theatre Forum in 2011 and co-convening the Bundanon Trust’s annual art/environment/science
Siteworks event in 2010-11. From 1999-2008, Fiona was Director of Performance Space, a national contemporary arts hub based in Sydney. She was instrumental in the development of Carriageworks, collaborating with the arts sector, Arts NSW and architects of Tonkin Zulaikha Greer.
JURY’S STATEMENTS ABOUT THE 2020 SHORTLISTED ARTISTS
As a jury we would like to express the complexity of our arriving at a decision, in particular given the difficult conditions of this year 2020. The current pandemic has impacted all areas of life bringing forth and enhancing a number of pre-existing socio-political issues while adding a whole range of other challenges to all of us as a social collective.
In respect to ANTI Festival, the ongoing circumstances of the restrictions of the pandemic have led to a number of limitations, making it impossible for some artists and one of the jury members to be able to attend ANTI in person. We would therefore like to start our considerations by acknowledging the extraordinary work by the whole team of ANTI in materialising such a brilliant program in less than ideal conditions. We have experienced a passionate and highly professional setting and would like to enthusiastically congratulate you on a wonderful experience in Kuopio. An added thank you goes to the audience whose forceful interest in and support of ANTI is important, many of the audience being local people for whom the festival has been an enduring and important feature over the years.
As a jury working within the conditions of the pandemic we have worked together whilst being distributed across locations and time zones, with Fiona Winning in the unceded land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation also now known as Sydney, and João Laia and Kira O’Reilly in Helsinki and Kuopio.
ANTI Festival has done its utmost to enable solutions that facilitate our workings in these circumstances. We have all viewed extensive documentation of the considerable bodies of works by each of the artists, and all the artists SHORTLIST LIVE works have been experienced in person by one or more of us. We have discussed at length the import and impact of this, the difficulties and discomforts this affords, and with that – the trust and confidence we have strived to cultivate in working together. It has not been easy – and yet what a privilege this stimulating difficulty has been.
We would like to recognise and endorse the four exceptional artists and collective in this year’s Shortlist Live, our appreciation of their work being presented thus, and of the ideas, possibilities and provocations they have all brought to fruition to us their audiences and indeed to us their communities. Therefore we would like to address each artist and to truly give to this moment the proper attention and recognition they each so amply deserve.
We are now going to share with you our statements about each artist in alphabetical order after which we will announce the winner.
Ingri Fiksdal
Within the worldings of Ingri Fiksdales work lies the choreographic assembling of matter / – choero\graphic assemblages that activate systems of interaction – between bodies – all manner of bodies – that unfold over time. We as viewers are implicated by being offered the proposition of a fictioning, one with real world implications with which to rethink the received hierarchies of bodies that matter.
In Ingri’s work with her collaborators, objects, materials and things there a minimal imposition of compositional forces – so that all aspects of the materials and processes of the works are acknowledged as agential choreographic forces – combining in durational assemblages with the full political implications of what it is to assemble, to gather, to co-create and to be – together.
These are potent and pivotal concepts that are brought into striking activation in her approach to site, using landscape and place as a dramaturgy within which these abstracted bodies are given agency, and audience positions itself in relation to, so as to experience an embodied cognition of work.
We are moved by the direction of this accumulated body of work and it’s futures, the horizons it acknowledges and moves towards, co-creating with those who Ingri seeks to involved and to include.
Geumhyung Jeong
Geumhyung gives life to objects through her body and in turn hers – the artist’s body is transformed through the objects.
The risks Geumhyung takes in her work are considerable, both in what she reveals and the mechanisms of how she does so by the means in which she structures the relations between her own physicality and that of those she is operating and tending to. Lines of power, desire, and politics of care are animated through these performed orientations of interactions. There is an enormous sensitivity in her manipulation of the figures, models and parts – which she imbues with life and liveliness, bringing us the audience into experiences of precarity, to the edges of failure and to intense trepidation.
The traditional gendering of literacies and discourses found in engineering rationales and of technologies are subtly undone. There is a confidence and assurance of competency in the handling and articulation of the figures, machines and objects, whose tender reciprocal sensitivities enact critical questions around relationships between humans and machines. These enactments invite speculation as to the implications and prevarications of the technologies we build, care and think about, our affective interiors are mirrored in these models, figures and mechanics.
Brian Fuata
Brian’s work across various modes of presentation is framed through structured/timed improvisation that dialogues directly with his audience. He performed a riveting monologue for the Jury via Zoom and for a live audience at Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival in Sydney, each time carefully considering the mode of reception for his audience.
He located his genealogy, his geography within the colonial fiction of Australia and the Pacific, and his practice in the context of contemporary performance, visual and live art. The merging of hisphysicality, his musicality of language and playful associative subject matter is brimming with relevance to the contemporary moment. From care during the pandemic, to being a queer Samoan Australian in the contemporary art world, and from the women in his artistic milieu to the Black Lives Matter movement. He embodies apparitions, ghosts in our culture – that call up the unspeakable and the wondrous. His performance is delicate and agile – alive with criticality, generosity, energy and love.
W A U H A U S
W A U H A US decided not to be an individual but a collective – one that is dynamic, fostering worlds that build through the connectivity of their exchanges and processes. They demonstrate this integrity and with it their position as game changers in the Finnish context, and by extension internationally.
Wauhaus has created a powerful body of work which pushes boundaries by questioning institutionalised conceptions regarding art, performance and humanity. Materialising an expansive and yet highly coherent practice, Wauhaus engages with key issues marking the now, offering other forms of perceptual knowledge which sharply question what the world is and what it might become. Such an opening into the other is of key relevance in a global panorama where exclusionary ideas and positions have been progressively gaining traction and recovers strangeness as a powerful poetic and political tool. Likewise by operating as a collective, Wauhaus emphasises the need to revive communal forms of understanding and agency, countering the ongoing drive towards individualism and replacing it with caring and empathic shared ways of doing.