SAHA supports ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival within the scope of Onur Tayranoğlu’s project. Taking place between 15 - 20 September 2026, the festival is curated by the institution’s Director and Chief Curator, Elisa Itkonen, and celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

Queer Autonomous Zone (Kuopio) is a participatory public performance that imagines the founding ceremony of the Queer Autonomous Zone, a transnational conceptual site by queers, in Kuopio.

Developed together with queer residents of Kuopio, the Queer Autonomous Zone has formed its own ceremony as a gesture to trace the past and to write a future. It works with what is already present but cannot be named: the traces carried in rumours, friendships, shared spaces, and lives that resist fixed naming. Rather than trying to complete the historical record, the ceremony gathers around these fragments, asking how we might publicly honour those whose histories remain unfinished.

Onur Tayranoğlu is a Helsinki-based transdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates performativity within social, political, and cultural realities through site-situation specific performances and embodied research processes. They often work with various modes of documentation, using them both as raw artistic material and as a method for tracing the porous borders between lived experience and performance.

About ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is an international contemporary arts festival presenting site-specific works annually in September in Kuopio, Finland. Their work also includes facilitating art and the work of artists around the year thanks to various projects. All events are free of charge.