ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is proud to present the four shortlisted artists for the 2022 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and their performances in the Shortlist LIVE! Programme on the festival weekend 17th and 18th September 2022.
The nominees for the 2022 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live are: Zinzi Minott, Latai Taumoepeau, Liz Rosenfeld and River Lin.
"All four bodies of work stand formidable in relation to the most urgent issues of the contemporary moment, offering audiences recalcitrant poetics in the service of deep healing and meaningful strategies for survival. Social, political and geographical ecologies serve as a focal point, and allow us to be present with the trouble and potential of the present, to be present with the lineages we sustain and present with each other as cohabitants of dangerous times", the shortlisting committee writes about the shortlist.
We are excited to present the 4rd edition of the Shortlist LIVE! Programme: the nominees’ performances will be experienced live during the ANTI Festival taking place in Kuopio, Finland.
shortlist 2022
Liz rosenfeld (USA/DE)
Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin based interdisciplinary-artist and educator who works with the mediums of film/video, live performance and experimental discursive writing practices. Liz explores the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, and past/future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz's moving image and performance work approaches flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, regarding questions connected to the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Departing from the personal, Liz's writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are rooted in variant hypocritical desire(s).
Liz received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MA from The Department of Performance Studies at New York University in 2007. Liz was the 2017 Goethe-Institut artist in residence at LUX Moving Image in London. Liz’s films are represented by Video Data Bank and LUX Moving Image. Liz's films and performances have shown in various international museums and venues including 2022 Berlinale International Film Festival, Berlinische Galerie, Mapa Teatro, Sophiensæle, The Hebbel am Ufer Theatre, The Gorki Theatre, Arts Admin, Galerie Emanuel Layr, The Tate Modern, The Hammer Museum, The Leslie Lohman Museum,The Barbican Centre, The CAC-Glasgow, Tramway, The Stedelijk Museum, The C/O Gallery, and The Deutsches Historisches Museum.
River Lin (TW)
River Lin is a performance artist working across the contexts of visual art, dance and queer culture through making, researching, and curating. He stages live works in gallery settings as choreography, installations, encounters or situations to speculate notions of heteronormative construction, social engagement and performativity of mediums.
River’s work has been presented by the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Lafayette Anticipations, Centre National de la Danse (Paris), KANAL Centre Pompidou (Brussels), ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio), Live Art Development Agency (London), M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai), Asia Contemporary Art Week (New York/Dubai), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), 2016 Taipei Biennial, Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, Tokyo Real Underground Festival, and Liveworks Festival (Sydney) among others.
Born in 1984 in Taiwan, River lives and works between Paris and Taipei.
Latai Taumoepeau (AU / To)
Latai Taumoepeau makes live-art-work. Her faivā (body-centred practice) is from her homelands, the Island Kingdom of Tonga and her birthplace Sydney, land of the Gadigal. She mimicked, trained and un-learned dance, in multiple institutions of learning, beginning with her village, a suburban church hall, the club and a university.
Her faivā (performing art) centres Tongan philosophies of relational vā (space) and tā (time); cross-pollinating ancient and everyday temporal practice to make visible the impact of climate crisis in the Pacific. She conducts urgent environmental movements and actions to assist transformation in Oceania.
Latai engages in the socio-political landscape of Australia with sensibilities in race, class & the female body politic; committed to bringing the voice of unseen communities to the frangipani-less foreground. Latai has presented and exhibited across borders, countries, and coastines. Her works are held in private and public collections including written publications.
Latai was recently awarded a 2022 Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship and the Australia Council of the Arts Fellowship in the Emerging and Experimental Arts category. She is also a recipient of the Prague Quadrennial - Excellence in Performance Design Award in 2019.
In the near future Latai will return to her ancestral home and continue the ultimate faivā of deep sea voyaging and celestial navigation before she becomes ancestor.
Zinzi Minott (UK)
Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies and politics. Zinzi explores how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, Queer culture, gender and class. She is specifically interested in the place of Black women’s body within the form.
As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance seeing her live performance, filmic explorations and objects a different, but connected manifestations of dance and body based outcomes and enquiry.
Zinzi is interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage, and how the use of the glitch can help us to consider notions of racism one experiences through the span of a Black life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories and highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation.
shortlist live! 2022
Liz rosenfeld (USA/DE): i live in a house with a door
I Live in a house with a door, is a performance work in which Liz Rosenfeld explores the material of flesh through a narrative of cruising, erotic potential, environmental futures and discursive time. In a resistant relationship to metaphor, Rosenfeld collaborates and experiments with flesh as material and the possibilities it presents within its own autonomies and rhythms. Through dancing with breath and flesh, Rosenfeld culminates this experience with a science fiction text, where they are implicated in an erotic cruising scene with an invisible gas, called the Shimmer. The Shimmer effects both the physicality and emotionality of Rosenfeld's relationship to the body, while also implicating bodies of flesh in questions of environmental decline, queer sexuality and the potential of holes. As they engage in a duet with their flesh, Rosenfeld arrives at propositions of how the non-binary can transcend the markers of gender, offering the abundance of flesh as a material to serve a corporal resistance fuelled by the potential of radical erotic and intimate relationships. The title for this work is a quote from the book, "Time is a thing a body moves through" by T Fleischmann.
River Lin (TW): My Body is a Queer Library
Conceived and devised by artist River Lin for the framework of Shortlist LIVE of ANTI Contemporary Art Festival and the Kuopio City Library, My Body is a Queer Library is work composed by a series of live actions such as dance, story-telling, workshop, fashion show and other acts in an actual library.
A library is a cultural, educational and scientific institution that organize and collects knowledge production open to the public. While a contemporary library today has also functioned as a cultural centre, performing cultural collectivity to engage with community members through events or public programs has been as well taken into account. In this context, the artist wonders what a queer library would look like when a library goes live through living bodies as a temporary library within an existing spatial structure of a library.
My Body is a Queer Library will be bringing together a mixed group of Europe or Finland-based performers as a durational takeover to open up discussions and question what makes a library, what makes a library queer, what a queer library look like, and how ‘queer’ can facilitate our practices and understandings of acknowledging our bodies as a container and collection of of knowledge, education and everyday life.
Concept, choreography, visual design & artistic direction: River Lin
Venue: Kuopio Main library.
Latai Taumoepeau (TO/AU): Ocean island mine
A woman, a 2000kg block of ice, a shovel, and the steady walk from point A to point B. Back and forth, she works the open-cut mines of the past into the future of climate change; excavating the solid white rock into invisibility.
What remains in the aftershocks of empire? Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes. The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people's lives?
- Ann Stoler cited in Katerina Teaiwa, 2015
Zinzi minott (uk): Black on black
Black on Black is a solo dance performance by Zinzi Minott that explores Queerness, Blackness and the body as an archive.
The work interrogates dance as a form of labour and the limits of the body through the exhausting processes of repetition and duration. The 1h solo performance has been created from movement phrases donated to Zinzi by an extended network of Black dancers and artists. “If you could imagine a physical archive of dance”, asked Minott, “what nugget or phrase would you donate?”
In Black on Black, both dance and Blackness are archived physically, passed from body to body to form a physical archive of Black and Queer lineage. Minott uses duration, repetition and exhaustion to show the erasure of the Black dance anthology – and the larger body of Black cultural practice – in histories of dance and art. As her exhaustion builds, the erasure becomes more evident. What if movement, handed on and shared, is the embodied language of Black lives across generations and geolocations? Perhaps the body itself, and a shared physical vocabulary, is the most tangible archive for remembering Black life and histories. Dance’s ephemerality is a tactic of resistance.
As Minott performs her solo, her phrases are altered, eroded by exhaustion, mirroring the ever-changing and always vulnerable existence of the archive. The work makes plain the fallible nature of the body, of the archive, of performance and of Blackness, all subject to forces of erasure.
Minott will perform her solo amidst a multi-screen audio-visual installation consisting of archival footage and other accompanying material from Minott’s personal image collection and footage of Minott with the other collaborating choreographers and dancers. It is also accompanied by a newly commissioned score composed by Gaika.
Black on Black aims to spark a nuanced discussion that attends to the lived and embodied intersections of race, class and gender in the aftermath of British colonialism. This is the first living archive of Black dance [in the UK?].
jury 2022
Robin deacon (UK), Chair of jury
Robin Deacon is a British artist, writer, educator and curator.
His art work and research explores questions of memory and fiction, with an ongoing shift in his role from biographer and academic to storyteller and unreliable narrator.
He graduated from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff in 1996, going on to present his performances, lectures and videos at conferences and festivals in the UK and internationally in Europe, the USA and Asia.
He has received a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as Artsadmin, the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc. He is also a MacDowell Fellow. His writings on the practice and ethics of performance reenactment and documentation (along with contributions to monographs on artists such as Baktruppen, Stuart Sherman and Joshua Sofaer) have been published by Routledge, NYU press and Intellect Live.
After a decade in the USA as a Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Robin returned to the UK in 2021 to become the Artistic Director and CEO of SPILL Festival, an international biennial of art and culture based in Ipswich, Suffolk.
ANNA teuwen (DE)
Anna Teuwen, born in Aachen, Germany in 1983, has been working as a dramaturge/curator at Kampnagel – International Center for Finer Arts in Hamburg since 2010. She studied German language and literature and philosophy at the RWTH Aachen for one year and moved on to the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen in 2003, where she graduated in 2009. In 2006, she studied at the University of Bergen (Norway) at the Institute of Theater Studies and in the Department of Scandinavian Studies during a stay abroad. In 2009 and 2011 she worked for the Impulse theater festival. Since 2006, she has also occasionally written as a freelance cultural journalist and taken on teaching assignments.
Gabi Ngcobo (ZA)
Gabi Ngcobo is an artist, educator, curator and curatorial director at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP) 2021-present. Since the early 2000s Ngcobo has been engaged in collaborative artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and on an international scope. Recent curatorial projects include Handle with Care (2021) and All in a Day’s Eye: The Politics of Innocence in the Javett Family Collection (2019), both at the Javett Art Centre- University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), Mating Birds Vol.2 at the KZNSA Gallery, Durban (2019). In 2018 Ngcobo curatorially directed the 10th Berlin Biennale titled We don’t need another hero and was one of the co-curators of the 32nd Sao Paulo Bienal titled Incenteza Viva (2016). She is a founding member of the Johannesburg based collaborative platforms NGO – Nothing Gets Organised (2016-) and the Center for Historical Reenactments (2010–14).
Ngcobo’s writings have been published in various publications including the reader Uneven Bodies, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Aotearoa New Zealand (2021), The Stronger We Become the catalogue of the South African Pavillion, Venice (2019), We Are Many: Art, the Political and Multiple Truths, Verbier Art Summit (2019) and Texte Zur Kunst September 2017.
JURY’S STATEMENTS ABOUT THE 2022 SHORTLISTED ARTISTS
Jury statement, Kuopio 17 September 2022
Robin Deacon, Anna Teuwen and Gabi Ngcobo
Process
The jury has had access to extensive portfolios marking the amazing journeys these artists have been on. As well as convening in Kuopio to see the works the artists have presented as part of the Shortlist Live! Programme, the jury have also spent our time at the festival in a series of fascinating dialogues with the artists. These conversations have been a real privilege, as we have been able to dig deeper into the motivations, desires and politics that drive these bodies of work.
The following are a series of brief statements about each of the artists that summarise the jury’s observations stemming from the portfolios, conversations we have had with the artists and of course, the live work itself that we have seen here in Kuopio.
Latai Taumoepeau
“The more ancient I am, the more contemporary my work is.”
This fascinating quotation from Latai Taumoepeau represents a great summation of a practice that aims to “centre indigenous knowledge systems”. The jury was struck by how brilliantly her work engages with issues of climate change and reconstruction of ancestral place.
Many of us would have found ourselves in the town square observing Latai’s performance – Ocean, Island, Mine. The jury felt this work was representative of the best kind of a methodical, long durational practice – moving ice from one end of the square to another, but with shifts in patterns and ways of doing. This introduced a complexity in the repetitions that spoke to more than the artist’s exhaustion. This is, at its core, body centered work – what Latai has described as “doing space”.
The jury was particularly impressed with Latai’s reflections on a form of artistic engagement that can shift into broader areas of land management and social engagement. Through all our interactions with Latai’s practice, the jury had a clear sense of an artist in a unique process of rebuilding themselves and taking their practice into genuinely new and expansive directions.
Zinzi Minott
Repetition, duration, exhaustion – these were the words that the jury returned to again and again when discussing Zinzi Minott’s work. Black on Black is a monumental work of sound, video and dance, speaking of hardship, perseverance and joy. The jury were all of the opinion that the visuals of the performance were incredibly powerful, and the sonic landscape complex and impactful. We were also impressed by the overall form and the rhythm of the piece, in particular, the repeating and yet changing of images over time – like waves in the ocean. Here, we saw video, sound and body working in concert, with a clear mastery of production values and controlled glitch aesthetics.
There is a genuine sense of commitment in Zinzi’s work as an artist – this is most apparent in Fi Dem, her ongoing, episodic series of works produced and released on a yearly basis. It is clear that Zinzi is making work within and for her community, or as she puts it, with “a love of her community”.
In our conversation with Zinzi, the theme of barriers was strong – barriers for working class people, but also the struggle against racist institutions. Zinzi raised a pertinent question in relation to her work: “how does one have agency and safety over their body?” This is a question that the jury acknowledges as speaking to the need for new structures and networks to ensure survival and sustainability within this industry. The jury recognises the particular role and responsibility of arts institutions in providing better care and support in the face of the kinds precarity and vulnerability that Zinzi described to us.
River Lin
How do we categorise an artist like River Lin? Words such as ‘peer’ and ‘host’ were used in our conversations, but watching River’s captivating performance of My Body is a Queer Library in the library, the jury were struck by the careful consideration of site and the choreography and occupation of time. So, River might be seen as being a host of time.
In the conversation the jury had with River preceding the performance, we talked about how we might analyse and critique library-categorization systems – about who has the power to categorize the knowledge. The jury was excited by the breadth of topics and implications carried by the work – the architecture of libraries and how our bodies inhabit them; the library as a possible space for cruising for knowledge and for possibilities of random meetings with people who share similar interests.
In the performance itself, this was experienced through the centrality of the bodies as material that activated this usually silent space with music, dialogue, movement and playful intervention. It was strange – but also fun and refreshing – to see so much physical activity and noise in a space that is usually about thought and quiet contemplation.
Overall, the jury was delighted to observe (and participate in) River’s thoughtful and explorations of categorisation and recategorization, and to engage with the new forms of knowledge that stemmed from this process.
Liz Rosenfeld
Breath, body and desire… to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s performance is a pleasure, a gift, a revelation. In all our interactions with this body of work, the jury was taken by Liz’s special ability to create co-presence as a caring practice. The bond between the audience and those performing was often tangible, both in the documentation and the live experience of the work. This is alongside a sense of community generated in their methods of working – a collaborative ethos is clearly central to their practice.
In conversation with the jury, Liz spoke of a pleasure in “building a body of work over your whole life.” As well as a beautifully constructed portfolio, they shared a phenomenally well written piece of text with us on the practice of cruising that was incredibly effective in the way their voice merged with, and emerged from the writing. That this kind of pleasurable melding of voice and text is central to Liz’s practice was also apparent in their performance for ANTI, I live in a house with a door.
The jury were impressed and moved by their sensual use of the body as material, that gave vivid, touching and unexpected images to seemingly unimaginable feelings. That there still remained the possibility for humour in Liz’s work was refreshing, particularly in relation to the depictions of risk and danger (both covert and overt) that have come into play in much of their work.
Our Decision
All of these artists are brilliant practitioners, and there has been a particular joy in getting to know them all not just as artists, but as people. But the jury was tasked with choosing one artist. So, the winner of the 2022 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art is Latai Taumoepeau.
Who We Are
The jury for the 2022 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art was UK based artist, writer and curator Robin Deacon (Chair), Anna Teuwen of Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany and Gabi Ngcobo, of the Javeet Art Center at the University of Pretoria.
Thanks
The jury would like to give particular thanks to Riikka Stewen for her generosity and insight as an outside observer who joined us to provide context and precedent for our jury deliberations. Thanks also for the support given to us from Suvi, Elisa and the whole ANTI Festival team. Finally, we would like to recognise the work of the shortlisting committee in bringing to us such a remarkable range of artist practices to our attention.