WILLOH WINS INTERNATIONAL ART PRIZE

Aphids Artistic Director Willoh S. Weiland has won the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one of Finland’s most prestigious awards. The prize was created in 2014 to increase the recognition of Live Art at the forefront of contemporary art. Willoh was chosen from a pool of 40 artists put forward by a group of international curators and directors.

The announcement was made on 4th September during the 2015 ANTI-Contemporary Art Festival where Willoh was directing All the Queens Mens’ Fun Run. As the winning artist, she has been commissioned to create a new work for the ANTI Festival in 2016.

According to the jury selection committee statement, Willoh’s work was chosen for its astonishing ambition:

“Her body of work to date appears to know no limits—it inhabits the city, the suburb, the natural world, even outer space, no less, with the same sure-footedness, elegance, intelligence and verve. Her work has real scale, these are large, complex projects involving and implicating many people. There is an impressive dramaturgy at work, an intuitive sense of visual composition, of orchestration, of direction with a vision that can deftly move, shift, adapt to new perspectives, new territories, new ways of being. This is thoroughly exciting work. Her projects are deeply serious and deeply humorous in equal measure. They are also spectacular, epic and impossible to ignore.”