Play, games and gaming driving ANTI Festival 2018 – Open Call for Proposals

Media release 16.11.2017

The 17th edition of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival will take place between 25th and 30th September 2018. We now invite artists, working in any field, to propose projects that directly engage with ideas of play, playfulness, games and gaming.

A playful engagement with the spaces of Kuopio, ANTI Festival’s host city, has been at the heart of our approach to bringing vital, exciting and surprising contemporary art to this ever receptive and inquisitive community. For 2018 we’re focusing our attentions properly on play and gaming – gaming in both its contemporary sense as an engagement with digital environments but also in a more expanded sense: what games, and what play, as adults, as young people, as children, do we engaged with – what forms does play take, and where and
how to do we encounter it?

We have some clear answers, organised games are played habitually across the world – football, chess, bowls, snooker – all have their professional contexts but all too engender mass engagement and participation. Other forms of play, particularly for adults, have surfaced across the last half-century. Much is discussed around skateboarding and how that practice playfully renegotiates urban space, free-running and parkour have continued the same pursuit. Rural environments, long the space of adventure, journey and leisure, have their associated play activities and in more recent years digital and virtual technologies have created a playing space of incredible scale and value, one to rival, and royally beat, those more passive forms of entertainment.

Play and games, in forms as divergent as any other realm of human activity, sit at the heart of the contemporary experience. Games are in our pockets, on our screens, in our bodies, they are played in and on the city, the landscape, the sea, the globe. They keep us well, they move us, orientate us, challenge us, frustrate us and entertain us. Games and play have become a way – an active way – of understanding the world and each other.

For our 2018 festival ANTI is thrilled to announce partnerships with Games for Health Finland and the International Game Developers Association, Kuopio Hub.

Games for Health Finland is coordinated by the Savonia University of Applied Sciences.

Submitting a Proposal

When proposing your project please take into account that ANTI Festival presents its programme in public space, this includes interior spaces and privately-owned spaces. We do not show projects in traditional cultural spaces and houses thus your proposed project will need to have an integral relationship with the place
in which it is presented.

All proposals must be sent using this electronic form and
written in English.

The form allows a link to be made to online documentation of previous work and for applicants to attach a CV and a maximum of three supporting images. Proposals that do not strictly conform to these guidelines
will not be considered.

We advice the applicants to get familiar with the artistic direction of ANTI Festival by reviewing our
past projects on, for example, our Vimeo page!

The proposal deadline is 12.12.2017 (at the midnight in Finnish time).

Proposed projects may respond to one or more of the following areas:

Play and social space
Play and subjectivity
Play and physical space
Play and wayfinding
Game play as social encounter
Game ‘space’ as site of social exploration
Play and low/no technology
Play and technology
Virtual play
Play and wellbeing
Public play environments
Games, engagement and participation
Professionalised play
Play and leisure
Play and competition
Cross-generational play

Further information: info@antifestival.com

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival

Participation, dialogue and exchange: ANTI works with innovative artists on projects that
explore and explode urban space.

ANTI began life in 2002. Since then we’ve produced 16 editions of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and have established a year-round programme of artist residencies and cultural projects and events.

The festival is held annually in Kuopio, Finland. The city plays host to projects by artists from around the world that 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.