ARTISTS

This year’s 20th anniversary program emphasizes the importance of continuity through renewal, featuring artists returning to the festival’s shared history, interwoven with new voices that carry it forward.

Among the returning artists is Raeda Saadeh (Palestine), whose powerful and timely actions accentuate life under occupation, where body and thought bear the weight of everyday life, resistance, and belonging. Rong Xie (China/UK), also known as Echo Morgan, returns with new works that intertwine her intense exploration of text, thought, motherhood, migration, and identity. Wathiq Al-Ameri (Iraq/Switzerland), in turn, explores the geopolitics of everyday life, in his characteristically poetic expression and quietly charged presence, while Jianjun Xi (China/UK) navigates the borderlands of language and culture with resonant Chinese porcelain as his starting point. Stein Henningsen (Norway) presents uncompromising existential actions with biblical references, and a spiritual presence that leaves lasting impressions on the viewer, while Nigel Rolfe (Ireland), active since the 1970s, continues to embody the role of freedom in historical and collective memory. Joakim Stampe (Sweden), as co-founder of the festival and a Swedish international figure in performance art, is the guest of honor in this year’s artistic program celebrating 20 years of Live Action, with his poetic-democratic actions moving between the vulnerable and the symbolically charged in dialogue with site and audience.

Among the new voices this year are several renowned performance artists, including Asanda Chuma Sopotela (South Africa), Nezaket Ekici (Turkey/Germany), Snezana Golubovic (Serbia/Germany), Mai Bach Ngoc Nguyen (Vietnam/Canada) and Janusz Bałdyga (Poland). Sopotela is an award-winning South African artist who merges physical performance, storytelling, and ritual in works that explore identity, memory, and social engagement from deeply rooted cultural perspectives. Ekici, a former student of Marina Abramovic, combines humor, ritual, and formal precision in a visually physical vocabulary where thought and mind meets the body. Golubovic, also a former student of Abramovic, works with the slowness of presence — pieces where time flows through the body, and small shifts in posture or gaze open existentially charged new spaces. Meanwhile, Nguyen creates site-specific pieces that question norms, evoke chaos, and invite audiences into emergent, shared “situations” where power and affect with resonance unfold into the future. In Bałdyga’s visual world, we encounter the stripped-down and exact—movement of balance pushed to the edge, as fragile constructions of both material and meaning. All in all articulating an interesting and intriguing program for everyone. Welcome.