Shortlisting Committee’s statement 2022

The shortlisting committee of the 2022 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art is proud to announce this year’s shortlist.

After extensive and engrossing deliberation, we are pleased to honour the work of artists Zinzi Minott, Latai Taumoepeau, Liz Rosenfeld and River Lin. Hailing from, and working across, a splendid range of national, thematic, material and formal boundaries, these four artists are dynamic and distinguished contributors to the field of Live Art.

The shortlisted artists will come together in Kuopio for Shortlist LIVE!, a programme of work by each artist, which will be viewed by an independent jury who will select this year’s winner.

Through the selection process, it was exciting to discover common threads and areas of overlap among the four shortlisted nominees.

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.

Dance, movement and the body as a material encounter with the world reflect a wider choreographic turn in performance art, as all of the artists in their unique ways use movement to inaugurate personal materiality as sites of resistance. These are bodies at the sharp end of ongoing historical violences and radical innovations for human survival, engaged in deliberate and thoughtful encounters to challenge, integrate, enquire, deconstruct and repair.

These are practices which activate methodologies to which the institutions of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy are sceptical, hostile and/or unaware; practices which deploy the structures and technologies of the established order to expose and interrogate it; practices of shadow and light, chiaroscuro in four dimensions, using literal and metaphorical darkness and illumination to remake meaning and proffer new understanding.

To our shortlisted artists, congratulations and thank you for the excellence, beauty and rigour you’ve brought to bear in your practice. To our audience, we hope that you will be as moved and inspired by the work of these outstanding artists as we have been.

Season Butler

Madeleine Flynn

Gregg Whelan

The Prize is supported by the Saastamoinen Foundation, and the Shortlist LIVE! is supported by the Kone Foundation.