Shortlist LIVE! #2

Shortlist LIVE! is an entity built around the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, which presents the annual award nominees extensively. One part of the entity is the bilingual Shortlist LIVE! publication. The core of the publication consists of artist essays on nominees for the prize. 

The authors of the essays are proposed by the artists themselves. This year, the world’s most significant Live Art Prize nominees are Ingri Fiksdal from Norway, Brian Fuata from Australia, Geumhyung Jeong from South Korea and the Finnish art collective W A U H A U S.

Ingri Fiksdal’s artist portrait starts to form from the Norwegian fjords. The author, Amanda Jane Steggell, Professor of Choreography at the Oslo University of the Arts, takes the reader on a journey into Fiksdal’s childhood landscapes and her first art and culture experiences, thus drawing a cinematic arc of Fiksdal’s growth as a major choreographer and art scholar. The question of where artists get their inspiration and where their aesthetics are based gets a concrete resonance in this text.

Artist, writer, dj and researcher Lucreccia Quintanilla recalls his and Brian Fuata’s first encounter and reflects Fuata’s artistic work on the stages of Australia’s anti-racist movement and the expectations towards BIPOC bodies in the arts’ context. Fuata’s art, often located in galleries and public spaces, is political and funny and direct, familial and warm at the same time. It’s not subject to preconceived expectations or assumptions. Quintanilla’s and Fuata’s friendship began already in 1997.

The practice of Geumhyung Jeong, which uniquely combines robotics, automation and Live Art, is presented by freelance writer, curator and critic Ginevra Bria. The snappy text requires chewing, which is a great companion for Jeong’s art. With her background in theatre, dance and animated films Jeong has expanded her practice to the installations in recent years. Psychoanalysis, technology, post-Covid-19 could work as a keywords for this text called ‘Living Paradoxes of Immune Simulacra’ as well as the works by Jeong, to mention some.

When thinking of WAUHAUS, the seven-person art collective, the essay’s writer, performance artist and lecturer in Contemporary Performance Aune Kallinen ends up thinking about garden, things that are connected, class and taste, how analogies can prevent us from seeing and lead us astray, resilience, courage, of being unprejudiced, of freedom and space, thinking of of all kinds of things. The lyrical essay opens W A U H A U S’ works and philosophy in a moving and multisensory way. Appropriate considering the subject of the text.