ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is proud to present the four shortlisted artists for the 2021 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and their performances in the Shortlist LIVE! Programme.
The nominees for the 2021 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live are: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (Poland/UK), keyon gaskin (United States), Florentina Holzinger (Austria) and Narcissister (United States).
We are excited to present the 3rd edition of the Shortlist LIVE! Programme: the nominees’ performances will be experienced live during the ANTI Festival taking place in Kuopio, Finland between 14th and 19th September 2021.
ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art is an extraordinary award that marks, celebrates and supports extraordinary artists. On Saturday 18th September we will award the Prize for the 8th time in Kuopio.
Shortlist 2021
Alex Baczynski-JENKINS (PL/UK)
Artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins engages with queer affect, embodiment and relationality.
Through gesture, collectivity, touch and sensuality, his practice unfolds structures and politics of desire.
Relationality is present in the dialogical ways in which the work is developed and performed as well as in the materials and interdependent poetics it invokes. This includes tracing relations between sensation and sociality, embodied expression and alienation, the textures of everyday experience, the utopian and latent queer archives. He approaches choreography as a way of reflecting on the matter of feeling, perception and collective emergence, while producing other ways of experiencing memory, time and change. He is co-founder of Kem, a Warsaw based queer feminist collective focused on choreography, performance and sound at the interface with social practice. Through various experimental formats and community building, Kem engages in critical intimacy and queer pleasure.
KEYON GASKIN (US)
keyon Gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials.
Florentina holzinger (AT)
Florentina Holzinger’s dance pieces are driven by the notion of identity, sexual and physical transgression. Drawing inspiration as much from Viennese Actionism, body art and bodybuilding as from classical ballet, cabaret and circus; she deconstructs, performance after performance, the very definition of femininity.
Florentina studied choreography at the School for New Dance Development (SNDO) at the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten. Her Diploma solo work Silk was awarded the Prix Jardin d’Europe at the lmPulsTanz Festival 2012. She collaborated with Vincent Riebeek for a trilogy of pieces, Kein Applaus für Scheiße, Spirit, and Wellness followed by Schoenheitsabend- Tänze des Grauens und der Extase (2011-2015). Her second solo work premiered in 2015 – Recovery is an experimental consideration on a traumatic stage accident she had suffered and critically explores various kinds of female representation as well as the potential of female corporality.
In her latest works she continued dissecting the narratives of ballet: first with Apollon (2017), a hack on Balanchines’s 1920s Apollon Musagete, followed by TANZ, an action ballet that reflects on tradition and narrative departing from the romantic ballet La Sylphide. Her latest work Etude for an Emergency, is a stunt opera developed with a cast of opera singers and stunt actresses – a musical composition for 10 bodies and a car. In 2020 TANZ was awarded for “Best Performance of the Year” by Theater Heute and with the NESTROY Price for best direction.
Along her stage works Florentina is regularly teaching movement classes and offers trainings.
Her work is intrinsically linked with the aim of exploring modes of embodiment and the development of practices to support a physical life in action. Her practice is heavily informed by martial arts, functional and somatic movement practices as well as everything dance.
narcissister (US)
Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing mask and merkin, she works at the intersection of contemporary dance, visual art, and activism. She actively integrates her prior experience as a professional dancer and commercial artist with her art practice in a range of media including live performance, collage, sculpture, video, film, and experimental music. She has presented work worldwide at festivals, nightclubs, museums, and galleries.
Her art video “Vaseline” won Best Use of a Sex Toy at The Good Vibrations Erotic Film Festival. In 2013 she received a Bessie Award nomination for the theatrical performance of “Organ Player” and in 2015 she received Creative Capital and United States Artists Awards. Interested in troubling the popular entertainment and experimental art divide, she appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Her first feature film “Narcissister Organ Player” premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2018; the European premiere was at the Locarno International Film Festival. Also in 2018 she had a solo exhibition at Participant Inc. gallery in New York.
She is a Sundance Theatre Lab 2018 Fellow for the development of a new evening length performance commissioned by the Soho Rep in New York. She was nominated for the ArtPace Residency in San Antonio, Texas in Summer 2019 and her activist short art film “Narcissister Breast Work” premiered at Sundance 2020.
Shortlist LIVE! 2021
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (pl/uk): the tremble
The tremble is the first episode of the work The tremble, the symptom, the swell and the hole together which unfolds over four episodes.
The work enacts a choreographic mediation on the relationships between touch, intimacy, loss and collectivity. Each episode has its specific embodied vocabulary through which the performers navigate intimate and fragmentary exchanges reflecting on the edges of subjectivity, corporeality and relationality. In this choreography Baczynski-Jenkins develops vocabularies that range from micro-gestures to poems, social dances and their abstractions. An important part of his work is the use of performance as an agent for what he describes as ‘other-worlding’. Expressions of care and empathy lose their usual conventions and representations and are found through micro-gestures, figures of entanglement and dances. Instead of a plot, there is a plotting of an affective field embodied by queer affections that circulate between the performers.
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/alex-baczynski-jenkins-pl-uk-the-tremble/
keyon gaskin (us): its not a thing
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/keyon-gaskin-us-its-not-a-thing/
Florentina Holzinger (AT): APOLLOn
Six women tackle the neoliberalist cult of the body with all their performative brilliance and vicious physical virtuosity. The performance limbos between the aesthetics of an occult fitness-studio, a cyborg-bullfight and neoclassical ballet.
Florentina Holzinger combines fin de siècle freakshow and 1960s live art, offering a new perspective on the rupture between high art and entertainment culture. Through this humorous and furious destruction of a classical narrative Holzinger addresses the myth of this supposedly perfect woman, the artist herself. These perfect women – what do they even want?
This performance contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing.
Additional support: Austrian Embassy Helsinki & Goethe-Institut Finnland
Schedules and seat reservation: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/florentina-holzinger-at-apollon/
Narcissister (us): Narcissister
The New York based artist and performer Narcissister presents an evening-length set consisting of video and live performance works from her repertoire.
Narcissister’s performances refigure narcissism through radical acts of self love, acts that, in turn, reveal and conceal the racializing and eroticizing effects of our commodity-driven culture. Covered by mask and merkin, Narcissister plays with the limits of burlesque, masquerade, and performance art as she uncovers her body and its potential to animate objecthood.
Schedules and seat reservations: https://antifestival.com/en/tapahtuma/narcissister-lives/
JURY 2021
MARIA LIND (SE), Chair of jury
MARIA LIND (SE), Chair of jury
Maria Lind is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. She is currently serving as the counsellor of culture at the Embassy of Sweden, Moscow.
She was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall (2011-2018), the artistic director of the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the director of the graduate program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2008-2010) and director of IASPIS in Stockholm (2005-2007). From 2002-2004 she was the director of Kunstverein München and in 1998, co-curator of Europe’s itinerant biennial, Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg. In 2015 she curated Future Light for the first Vienna Biennial, and in 2019 she co-curated the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara.
She has taught widely since the early 1990s, including as A professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo 2015-18. Currently she is a lecturer at Konstfack’s CuratorLab.
She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogues and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press, and Seven Years: The Rematerialisation of Art from 2011 to 2017 appeared in the fall of 2019. Her most recent book is Konstringar: Vad gör samtidskonsten? (Natur & Kultur, 2021), and she has edited Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden (Sternberg Press, 2021).
JENNIE KLEIN (US)
Jennie Klein is a professor at Ohio University in the School of Art + Design. Her research interests include contemporary art, performance/ live art, feminist and gender theory and art history, and maternal studies.
Klein has published in a number of journals and art magazines, including New Art Examiner, Art Papers, Afterimage, Genders, n.paradoxa, Contemporary Theatre Review, and PAJ. She is the editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Art of Marilyn Arsem (co-edited with Natalie Loveless), Assuming the Ecosexual Position by Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, Histories and Practices of Live Art (co-edited with Deirdre Heddon), and The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art (co-edited with Myrel Chernick).
Klein is currently involved with The Routledge Companion to Performance Art, co-edited with Natalie Loveless, a book that seeks to includes voices, institutions, and events around live art that are outside of Western Europe and North America.
PILVI PORKOLA (FI)
Dr Pilvi Porkola is a performance artist, researcher, writer and pedagogue.
She was a founder and a editor-in-chief of Esitys magazine, a publication focusing on performance arts (2007-2017). She is also the editor of Performance Artist’s Workbook. On teaching and learning performance art - essays and exercises (University of the Arts Helsinki, 2017).
Currently she is working as Senior Researcher in Academy of Finland funded project “Political Imagination and Alternative Futures” (2020-2024) at University of Turku.
JURY’S STATEMENTS ABOUT THE 2021 SHORTLISTED ARTISTS
Jury statement, Kuopio 18 September 2021
Jennie Klein, Pilvi Porkola, and Maria Lind
We have now emerged from our very interesting jury discussions. We have learned a lot from the process and we feel privileged to have been given this opportunity by the Anti Festival International Prize for Live Art. This wonderful prize consists of 15.000€ cash for the winner , as well as 15.000€ for production support for a new work made for the next edition of the festival.
With Florentina Holzinger’s Apollon, we were struck by her willingness to engage with other areas of movement outside of dance, including sports, weightlifting, side shows, and acrobatics. This work has a great deal of ambition, courage, and inquiry, which we value. We were impressed by Holzinger’s ability to choose the right person for the part. Of particular note was Evelyn Frantti.
We appreciate Narcissister’s skills as a performer, especially timing and the creative use of props. We were particularly intrigued with the way that she plays with doubling, mirror effects, and illusions, and how the work harks back to the single person orchestra phenomenon of the nineteenth century. We were impressed with the DIY creation of props, costumes, and videos, reminiscent of some of the best video art of the nineties.
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins Tremble was mindful, gentle, and created a captivating non-judgmental space for how humans can relate to one another, in a shared space. The piece was modest in the best sense of the word. We really appreciate the variation in age, background, and training of the performers.
It’s Not A Thing by Keyon Gaskin addressed the institutional structure of performance art, including the inherent racist and gendered bias of the art world with a physical and smart performance. Their work is particularly pertinent for a U.S. context given the events of the past four years. This is challenging work that we hope will continue.
We chose Alex Baczynski-Jenkins as the recipient of this award because what was mentioned above, and also because of how his practice nurtures interdependence within and beyond performance – this is particularly urgent today.