ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival

ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival 10.-15.9.2019

The 18th edition of ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 10th and 15th September 2019. Internationally celebrated, award-winning artists from around the world will once again present their projects in Kuopio. The rest of the programme will be published soon!

The theme and focus for the 18th edition of ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival is death. The programme traces various iterations of death in an attempt to open-up thinking around our relationship to it and to the many sets of phenomena that surround it. Ideas die, eras end, materials become obsolete, things break, technology supersedes itself, places are abandoned, the natural world is destroyed, social and political ideals are overthrown, and plant, animal and human life is finite.

Artistic directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan are looking forward to this year’s festival:

"We’re surprised it’s taken us 18 years to get here. Ideas of death, its impact, its social and cultural standing, its place in human life, its place in all life, has been one of the key drivers behind artistic practice for centuries.

So how does contemporary art speak to this most contemporary, and ageless, presence in our lives? That’s the central question driving ANTI’s 2019 programme; what new practice, what new experience, new knowledge and new joy can we locate in thinking about and working about death?” During the festival week, we will award ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one of world’s most exciting cultural prizes. This year the prize nominees will be present their pieces in Kuopio during the festival.

ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival works with innovative artists on projects that explore and explode urban space. Held annually in Kuopio, Finland, the city hosts the festival, projects by artists from around the world inhabit the spaces of public life – homes, shops, city squares, business, forests, lakes – and directly engage communities and audiences in the making and showing of their work. The festival is free to attend.