ANTI Contemporary Art Festival 2019: Death

This curatorial practice research gathered international performance makers, installation artists, grief facilitators and academics/artists working with theology and philosophy to deliver a programme of publicly sited art works and a series of public discussion platforms to explore how contemporary creative practices are working with responses to death, as subject, process and aesthetic and how those explorations might offer insights to actors professionally engaged in thinking and practice around death and to a broad public audience. Produced by ANTI Contemporary Art Festival (Kuopio, Finland) the research presented an interdisciplinary set of enquiries that, across creative and discursive frameworks examined how corporeal, spiritual, social, cultural and political paradigms are present in an encounter with death and asked what creative affordances might be engendered by their meeting. International performance and installation works, a series of three facilitated ‘Death Cafés’ and further public discussion led by Professor of Practical Theology Kati Tervo-Niemelä (University of Eastern Finland) offered participatory engagement with, and reflection on, this question to a broad public/festival audience of 12,000 people. The performance/installation programme presented: Nesterval (AT), Anna-Liisa Nesterval; Lara Thoms (AU), The Director; Loren Kronemyer (AU), After Erika Eiffel; J. A. Juvani (FI), Tanatologia; Lucy Willow (UK), The Mourner – Lamentation in Dust; Mimosa Norja (FI), Dear Deer (commissioned in partnership with Reality Research Center, Helsinki); Maria Lucia Cruz Correia (BE), Voice of Nature: The Trial; Moth (UK), In the Face of Death. Professor Tervo-Niemelä and researcher Anja Terkamo-Moisio (University of Eastern Finland) presented a ‘walking discussion’ on death and fear and Arni Hiltunen and Sanna Hiltunen facilitated three Death Café’s – informal public gatherings for sharing experiences of death as founded by Jon Underwood. Audiences and invited artists/academics moved between the arts programme and discussion-based presentations, with each framing, questioning and extending the territory of the other.

• https://antifestival.com/en/
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4084/
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4083
• http://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/4088