ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is proud to present the four shortlisted artists for the 2023 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art and their performances in the Shortlist LIVE! Programme on the festival weekend 15th and 16th September 2023.
The nominees for the 2023 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art are: Tiziano Cruz (Argentina), Autumn Knight (United States), Jota Mombaça (Brazil) and Joshua Serafin (Philippines/Belgium).
“While each of them comes from a unique artistic and geographical background, these artists are all exceptional change-makers in Live Art. They invite us to engage socio-political and ecological realities outside of Eurocentric systems and show us what it means to dream and practice alternative futures”, the shortlisting committee, Pelin Başaran, John Tain and Elisa Itkonen, writes about the shortlist.
We are excited to present the 5rd edition of the Shortlist LIVE! Programme: the nominees’ performances will be experienced live during the ANTI Festival taking place in Kuopio, Finland.
shortlist 2023
Tiziano Cruz (AR)
Tiziano Cruz is from a town called San Francisco that belongs to the Valle Grande department of the province of Jujuy, in the north of Argentina. He was born and raised on the border between Chile and Bolivia, lands through which nine indigenous communities have passed; the Atacama, the Kollas, the Guaraníes, the Tobas, the Ocloyas, the Omaguacas, the Tilianes and the Toaras.
Tiziano Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist. His work fundamentally brings together the visual and theatrical language, performance, and artistic intervention of public space.
WWW: tizianocruz.myportfolio.com
Instagram: @tizianocruzok
Autumn Knight (US)
Autumn Knight is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Drawing from her training in theatre and the psychology of group dynamics, New York–based artist Autumn Knight makes performances that reshape perceptions of race, gender, and authority. She scrutinizes institutional spaces that regulate African American subjects or that assert their absence, often putting black women at the center of the conversation to usurp the dynamics of a room with humor and with purpose. Knight’s video and performance work has been presented by various institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen (NY), and Performance Space New York. Knight is the recipient of the 2021-2022 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts and a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellowship.
WWW: autumnjoiknight.com
Instagram: @autkni
Jota Mombaça (BR)
Jota Mombaça lives and works between Lisbon, Portugal; and Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work derives from poetry, critical theory, and performance. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in their practice, which often relates to anti-colonial critique and gender disobedience. Through performance, visionary fiction, and situational strategies of knowledge production, they intend to rehearse the end of the world as we know it and the figuration of what comes after we dislodge the Modern-Colonial subject off its podium.
In 2020, Mombaça was granted the Pernod Ricard Fellowship in Paris, and the position of writer-in-residence at Nottingham Contemporary. Their visual and performative work has been included in institutional group exhibitions as the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, NIRIN (2020); More, More, More, TANK SHANGHAI (2020); the 46th Salon de Artistas in Colombia (2019); À Nordeste, SESC 24 de Maio (2019); the 34th São Paulo Biennale, Though it’s dark, still I sing (2021), among others. Their work is included in the Kadist Collection, as well as in the GfZK (Leipzig, DE) collection.
As a writer, Mombaça is the author of Ñ V NOS MATAR AGORA, a collection of texts published by EGEAC (Portugal, 2019) and Editora Cobogó (Brazil, 2021). Besides that, they have had their essays and fictional writings included in institutional publications such as The Contemporary Journal, Afterall, Le Magazine – Jeu de Paume, Terremoto.Mx, HAU 3000, Revista Piseagrama, among others.
WWW: jotamombaca.com/
Instagram: @monstraerratik
Joshua Serafin (PH/BE)
Joshua Serafin is a multi-disciplinary artist who combines dance, performance, visual arts, and choreography. Born in the Philippines, they are currently based in Brussels. They are also a house artist of Viernulvier from season 2023-2027. They are trained in dance in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and PARTS in Brussels. They also have finished their bachelor’s and master’s in Visual Arts in Fine arts in KASK in Ghent. Their works deal with questions about identity, transmigration, queer politics and representation, states of being, and ways of inhabiting the body. Their cosmology of works creates new forms of rituals, and embodiment, based on queer ecologies. Serafin’s work as a maker, performer, and dancer have been recently internationally acclaimed as they actively show and tour their work across the contemporary art scenes of Europe and in festivals in East Asia. Whether performing on stage, inside the museum, or through video and photography, Serafin’s artistic process is an intense sociological exorcism of Filipino identity with hybridity of the western ideologies; unpacking the historical violence of its feudal contemporary society and its dehumanising normality.
WWW: joshuaserafin.com
Instagram: @joshuadoser
shortlist live! 2023
Tiziano Cruz (AR): Soliloquy
Soliloquy – I woke up and hit my head against the wall is a performative monologue based on a series of letters written by the artist to his mother.
Tiziano Cruz puts himself front and centre in this performative monologue, based on a series of letters he wrote to his mother in 2020. Cruz’s mother lives in northern Argentina, and he was unable to travel there from his home in Buenos Aires during the first pandemic lockdown. Reaching her across boundaries of geography and class, Cruz uses the letters as the starting point for a critique of economic, racial and institutional oppression.
As an Indigenous artist, Cruz speaks about the suffering his people have endured under a system of white supremacy, examining the role Buenos Aires plays in Argentina’s culture of inequality. Using the power of theatre and the precision of language, Cruz poses a difficult question: What does it mean for him to use his body for art in a country where bodies like his are not supposed to exist?
Autumn Knight (US): SANITY TV
Sanity TV is a live performance with an open-ended structure. There is audience participation. There may be cameras. The artist drives the performance from point to point with improvisation, sound, and space activation. The viewers collaborate to determine the shape of the moment and breathe life into the infinite possibilities.
“It is an extremely experimental work for me that takes the form of a talk show in which the audience is imaginary and the “guests” – that range from objects to people- are invited into an imaginary dissociative conversational space by myself, the host. [- -] This work feels important, yet effortless; it achieves my goal of working with my strengths as an improvisational performer while instantly critically engaging my ongoing inquiry into psychodynamic theory.” -Autumn Knight, autumnjoiknight.com
JOTA MOMBAçA (BR): sinking could be
Sinking could be continues a cycle of Jota Mombaça’s recent site-specific compositions in which an assembly of materials including blue light, sound and cotton textiles are activated in order to inform a practice of elemental sensing.
In this project, the material inquiry is extended to the shoreline and the fluidity of sand, evoking the presence of Sloterplas lake, mined for sand to build Amsterdam’s Western Garden Cities; as well as to the resilience of aluminum, and the cutting force of water – here, manifested both in the process of sinking, in which the 4 aluminum sculptures that compose the installation are left under the water; and in the process of forming said aluminum sculptures, in which a water jet cutter was used to produce the shapes on a aluminum plaque.
sinking could be was initially produced with the support of the Ammodo Foundation, and presented as a performance and installation at de Appel, Amsterdam.
JOSHUA SERAFIN (PH/BE): VOID LIVE PERFORMANCE
Void is a work by Joshua Serafin in which we see the creation or birth of a god(dess) for the future. This god, Void, needs to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god(dess) of this time. Void’s choreographic movements embody the sadness, pain and grief of our current society.
Void gathers all the sadness, all the memories of hurt and longing, and turns them into pearls to keep in the astral realm, where the memories are kept for the gods to learn and archive humanity’s pain. When everyone is asleep, Void takes in all universal pain; when humanity awakes, their sadness feels lighter.
The live performance of Void is a physical manifestation coming from the video work. It is the 2nd iteration of a bigger cosmology of work titled “Cosmological Gangbang”. This piece is a conversation with live musician and a prerecorded soundscape. In the performance, we see Void on an island installation blending into its environment. Two light pillars that extend to the sky create a portal that connects the spirit and mortal realms. Void converses to the soundscape, the ecological and meta-realm landscape surrounding it. Its dance creates a ritual of birth, and rebirth, collecting global sadness and its beauty. An embodiment of our current society. In this performance we see an excerpt of the film “Creation Paradigm” where it narrates the origin of Void.
“Through the language of dance and choreography, Void (25’) by Joshua Serafin narrates the creation of a new God, the birth of a futuristic deity. Serafin’s research into the making of this piece is centered around creation myth stories of pre-colonial animistic religions from the Philippines, which were suppressed by the Spanish imposition of Catholicism. Through movement, the materiality of their bodily presence and the accompanying sci-fi soundtrack, this work proposes the foundation of a queer mythology; the nascent moment of a ‘queer spiritual force’ coming out of an apocalyptic era, perhaps our current one, that has arrived to refund a new kind of humanity. Void, this speculative new God, appears on earth to live in the mortal world to better understand what it means to be a god of a new time. In the words of the artist, the impetus for creating this work is to decolonize the self and to question heteronormative ideologies that were implemented in the Philippines and across the world by the west through religion. It takes as a starting point the Filipino pre-colonial identity which is fluid and doesn’t conform to binary representation, as is the case in many other pre-colonial societies.“
– Inti Atawallpa Guerrero
jury 2023
CASSILS (CA/US), Chair of jury
Cassils is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Cassils' art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture: Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, Cassils' work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment.
Cassils has had recent solo exhibitions at HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.
They are the recipient of the National Creation Fund (2022), a 2020 Fleck Residency from the Banff Center for the Arts, a Princeton Lewis Artist Fellowship finalist (2020), a Villa Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (2019), a United States Artist Fellowship (2018), a Guggenheim Fellowship and a COLA Grant (2017) and a Creative Capital Award (2015). They have received the inaugural ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, California Community Foundation Grant, MOTHA (Museum of Transgender Hirstory) award, and numerous Visual Artist Fellowships from the Canada Council of the Arts. Their work has been featured in New York Times, Boston Globe, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Wired, The Guardian, TDR, Performance Research, Art Journal and was the subject of the monograph Cassils published by MU Eindhoven 92015) and their new catalog Solutions, is published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, TX (2020). Cassils' work was recently acquired by the Victoria Albert Museum, London, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Leslie Lohman Museum.
Cassils is an Associate Professor in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto.
Adelaide Bannerman
Adelaide Bannerman is a curator, and curatorial director of Tiwani Contemporary, an international commercial art gallery in London, UK and Lagos, Nigeria.
Her independent research interests valorise the gestures, readings and engagements with live and visual art performance. She is a trustee of PUBLICS Helsinki.
Giovanna Esposito Yussif
Giovanna Esposito Yussif engages with curatorial praxis and research. Her background is in art history, museology, and critical theory. Giovanna has a long-standing commitment to nondominant praxes, dissentient imaginations, epistemic plurality and epistemologies in resistance. In 2019 she curated the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale with the Miracle Workers Collective. She is currently artistic director of the Museum of Impossible Forms, co-artistic of Drifts and the curator for M_itä biennale 2023.
Giovanna has collaborated with diverse institutions such as Helsinki Biennial, Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA, Helsinki City Museum, Archive, Goethe Institut, Savvy Contemporary, Manifesta Foundation, SOMA, Sinne Gallery, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Baltic Circle, Helsinki International Artist Program, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, RabRab Press, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Galería OMR, Fundación/Colección Jumex, among others. She edited A Greater Miracle Of Perception with Archive Books (2019) and Polyphonic Texts and Toolkit with Night Schoolers (2019), as well has written for diverse contemporary art publications. She has been guest Lecturer for Kuvataideakatemia, Taidekoulu Maa, Mentor for Live Art and Performance Studies-Theater Academy in Helsinki and Curatorial Practice at the University of Bergen, and an active contributor to diverse collectives, networks, and boards.