KUOPIO.- ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival announced Cassils, Adelaide Bannerman and Giovanna Esposito Yussif as the jury for the Live Art Prize 2023, which will take place in Kuopio, Finland, from 12 – 17 September.

In honour of the 10th anniversary of the Prize, Cassils, the first-ever artist to win the award, will chair of the jury.

Cassils (Canada/United States) is a transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of their performances. Their art contemplates the history(s) of LGBTQI+ violence, representation, struggle, survival, empowerment and systems of care. For Cassils, performance is a form of social sculpture. Drawing from the idea that bodies are formed in relation to forces of power and social expectations, their work excavates historical contexts to examine the present moment.

Their recent solo exhibitions include HOME Manchester, Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Perth Institute for Contemporary Arts, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, NYC; Institute for Contemporary Art, AU; Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts; School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Bemis Center, Omaha; MU Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Adelaide Bannerman is curator and curatorial director of Tiwani Contemporary, an international commercial art gallery in London, UK and Lagos, Nigeria. Her independent research interests valorise performative gestures and engagements with live and visual performance art.

Giovanna Esposito Yussif engages with curatorial praxis and research. Her background is in art history, museology, and critical theory. Giovanna has a long-standing commitment to nondominant praxes, dissentient imaginations, epistemic plurality and epistemologies in resistance. In 2019 she curated the Pavilion of Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale with the Miracle Workers Collective. She is currently artistic director of the Museum of Impossible Forms, co-artistic of Drifts and the curator for M_itä biennale 2023.

The jury will review the body of work from the nominees from the past few years and engage with their latest creations through the Shortlist LIVE! program, alongside fellow festival attendees, as part of the ANTI Festival 2023. The winner of the award will be announced at the ANTI Prize Party on Saturday, 16 September 2023.

With a value of 30,000 euros, the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art stands out as the world's only prize dedicated to live arts. The winning artist receives a cash prize of 15,000 euros and the same amount in the form of a production grant for presenting a commissioned new work at the next year’s ANTI Festival.

The nominees for the 2023 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art are: Autumn Knight (United States), Joshua Serafin (Philippines/Belgium), Jota Mombaça (Brazil) and Tiziano Cruz (Argentina).