KUOPIO.- 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.

ANTI is a festival of situated art, responding to and within our situation(s), trying to come to grips with who we are, what is happening, what we make of our histories, what matters urgently now and for our future. 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 feel and what we experience as knowledge about this moment in history.

The radical uncertainty implicit in this notion of knowledge-production is both more present and more necessary than ever as we are shaken by profound cultural and political upheavals. Through this turbulent moment, we are reminded of the classic statement of site-specific certainty, not only in matters of art but of the most cheerful and everyday map of public attractions: You Are Here.

One of the gifts of the festival as a form of assembly is a special kind of collaborative moment-making. With our focus on live art and performance, we engage with the specificity of this moment, the here and now.

ANTI unfolds through live encounters across the city of Kuopio – its streets and markets, its halls and business and sometimes even homes. This year we are delighted to contribute to the celebration of Kuopio City’s 250th anniversary. Milestone years can remind us that we are not just subjects of history but also its authors through our participation in society and culture.

All events are free of charge.

We are here. You are invited.

Several of this year’s artists take a unique and powerful position as bearers of history, narrators of historical meaning as this knowledge is present with us here and now. Their work guides us through and provides places for rest, reflection and togetherness.

Penetrating and poetic, Bone Library by S.J. 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, reappropriating technologies of etching, marking and telling.

Harold Offeh’s work often takes up space in such a stylised manner – recalling classical iconography, heroic statuary and the icons of contemporary culture – that the very act of being in a body in space becomes a question, a statement, a meditation. For ANTI 2025, 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.

In collaboration with local participants, 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. It is the product of research and process that mobilises multiple intelligences: the scholarly, the embodied, the emotional and the social.

On-Time Performance by Maija Suominen and the working group gives us a different take on the mechanism of flow through space and into the city through a performance-installation created for a long-distance train journey. This experiment with situatedness and dynamism gives us space to consider: what is it like to observe the environment as it flashes by like a panorama, at the speed at which forests and fields change into a mere hum? What does it mean to move, but to be still – to wait in motion?

How do you share a space and let it shape new relationships? Can a party become a collective, shared experience where the space itself becomes a living performance? A Piece of Space is a performative gathering at Culture Workshop Konepaja, created by Tea Andreoletti & Konepaja community members. The work emerges from a series of workshops with and for local communities, envisioning a shared promise for free and accessible cultural spaces in Kuopio.

I am from Reykjavik by Sonia Huges takes over a central place in the city, literally building on the questions of place, space and belonging that ring throughout this year’s programme. Come to the “here” that Hughes builds. Pass by or stay a while. Meet her and each other, meet people just like you. Arrive: here.

Bodies of water, and the bodies interacting with them, forms a thematic link through several of the works in this year’s programme, flowing to and through the city, constituting places of transition and assembly.

Waterways is a series of performative works curated by Riikka Thitz. In Kuopio, we will experience two of them, both created by artists who are originally from the city: The audio play Etiological Hydro Disruption Report by Teo Ala-Ruona explores the intimate politics of drinking water. This work interrogates the received superiority of “purity” and casts it through a political lens. EHDR takes the listener on a watery journey, following a being floating in a womb leaking plastic waste, out into a world where it encounters various social norms and classifications. Lilluminen by Anna Mustonen includes two pieces: a video work captured at Lake Kallavesi – the body of water that surrounds the city of Kuopio – and a live performance that delves further and deeper into the tidal flows of emotion, nostalgia and longing often reflected in the ripples when water collects and we take a still moment beside it.

The school kids of Kuopio, supported by UK-based artists Andy Field & Beckie Darlington, bring us the Museum of Small and Overlooked Things. This installation is an exhibition of objects collected and curated by Kuopio’s kids when they were asked to choose objects for the collection that they care about or value, but that adults think are unimportant. What will their selections tell us about who they are, who we are, and what Kuopio means to its future leaders?

ANTI Festival is once again collaborating with students from Aalto University’s department of Arts Education, where they will bring a series of participatory projects reflecting on the histories and futures of Kuopio’s public spaces.

Perhaps the key aspect of knowledge production – itself hardly a new concern in art or theory, of course – is less who is in a position to assert what knowledge, than who is empowered, by what, under what circumstances, to ask what questions? What we are able and allowed to conceive of asking is hardly innocent – which is why such question-making can be deployed both for oppression – and also its opposite. We want to ask and answer differently.

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.

Elisa Itkonen & Season Butler