24th edition: You Are Here

ANTI—Contemporary Art Festival will take place September 9-14, 2025 in Kuopio, Finland. The programme of the 24th edition explores questions of producing, archiving, and exhibiting knowledge. The festival works also discuss different phenomena drawing on place, space and belonging. ANTI will offer participants a place to collectively reflect on challenging themes and topics but also to simply gather together.

“It’s our privilege to create an environment for the live encounter with each other in our shared present, to take space, to share space, to assert what we experience as knowledge about this moment in history. In a moment when so much is unknown—and much remains to discover, recover and repair—we hope that in Kuopio in 2025, we will be able to say one thing with certainty: You Are Here,” the festival’s curators Elisa Itkonen and Season Butler write. 

Read the full curatorial statement, including descriptions of the festival works, on our website.

The ANTI Festival programme presents live art works by international and Finland-based artists in various different locations across Kuopio. All events are free of charge for the audience. The festival week will culminate with a festival club and the announcement of the 2025 winner of the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art.

Main programme 
Chiara Bersani (Italy): Left Behind 
SJ Norman (Australia): Bone Library 
Harold Offeh (UK): Body, Landscape, Memory 
Tea Andreoletti (Italy) & Konepaja Community: A Piece of Space
Andy Field, Beckie Darlington (UK) & Kuopio school kids: Museum of Small and Overlooked Things
Sonia Hughes (UK): I am from Reykjavik
Teo Ala-Ruona (Finland): Etiological Hydro Disruption Report (EHDR)
Anna Mustonen (Finland): Lilluminen
Suominen, Kirvesniemi, Lång & Räsänen (Finland): On-Time Performance
Aalto University Students (Finland)

Read more about the programme.

The world’s only live art prize to be awarded at the festival
Established in 2014, The ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, is presented biannually at ANTI Festival. An award of 30,000 euros makes the world's only international prize for Live Art one of the richest cultural prizes in the arts. The winning artist receives a cash prize of 15,000 euros and the same amount in production support for bringing a new work to the ANTI Festival two years after receiving the award. An international jury will select the winner. The Prize is funded by the Saastamoinen Foundation.

Each of the 2025 nominees will perform one of their pieces at the ANTI Festival:

Harold Offeh brings us an iteration of his on-going project Body, Landscape, Memory. Offeh and his collaborators - a diverse group of Kuopio residents - invite us on a journey through the local landscape. Drawing on cultural and historical references, as well as the group’s own memories, they invite us to consider how our understanding of belonging is shaped by our proximity to sites and locations.

Bone Library by SJ Norman is an ongoing, durational act of remembering and bringing the collateral of colonialism to the fore. For over a decade, Norman has catalogued complete dictionaries of Aboriginal Australian languages that are considered extinct by the standards of colonial anthropology. This iteration unfolds over several days, allowing us to witness and participate in the retrieval and re-inscription of words which colonial violence intended to destroy.

Chiara Bersani is creating Left Behind, a new choreographic work specifically for Kuopio. Bersani’s body of work echoes the anatomies of our inherited world through its architectures and structures of meaning and movement, and remakes them through an unruly, undisciplined vision of the body’s potential. An uncanny child of the post-romantic world, Bersani’s corpus is generous, patient and surprising. 

More coming up
During the summer, the festival programme will be complemented with meet-the-artist sessions and public discussions. The daily schedule and bookings (required to some of the performances) for the festival will be published in August.