REROUTING: ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Catalina Tuca

Catalina Tuca (b. Santiago, Chile) is a multidisciplinary Visual Artist, educator, and independent curator, working in the intersections of geographic identities, collective memories, and hybrid systems of collaboration and participation through existing technologies.

After earning a BFA and a degree in Visual Arts Education, she developed her career in Santiago, showing her work in solo and group exhibitions, teaching visual arts and film, and creating and directing art spaces. She participated in art residencies, in Japan, Colombia, and the United States. Following these experiences, in 2016 she moved to the US to pursue an MFA at Rutgers University from where she graduated in 2018. After that, she was a member at NEW INC, The New Museum Incubator Program NY, a resident at NARS Foundation NY, a fellow at The Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, NY, and at Collider Art Residency, Contemporary Calgary, CA, 2020.

She is currently part of the team of Film & Storytelling -Film Workshops for adults and kids- and Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US.

Cherrie Yu

Cherrie Yu is a 26 year old artist born in Xi’an, China. She is currently based in Chicago, IL and Charlotte, North Carolina. Her films and performances have shown at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Links Hall and Arts Club of Chicago, Trestle Gallery, Helena Anrather Gallery, and Wassaic Project in New York, and Chengdu Times Museum in China. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE Residency, Contemporary Calgary Museum, Monson Arts, and a visiting artist at Emory University. She is the awardee of the 2021 Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship, and will be an artist in residence at Yaddo Foundation in 2022. She is currently an artist in residence at McColl Center in North Carolina, and a visiting artist at the Visual Art department at UNCC.

Dawn Weleski

Dawn Weleski (b. Pittsburgh, USA) co-founded and co-directed Conflict Kitchen (with Jon Rubin), a take-out restaurant that served cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, which has been covered by over 900 international media and news outlets worldwide and was the North American finalist for the Second Annual International Award for Public Art in 2015. Her art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. She has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Project Row Houses, Houston; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; Arts House, Melbourne; and 91mQ, Berlin; has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; is a 2017 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow. Currently, Weleski is NEH Visiting Assistant Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University. In collaboration with Central New York residents, she is investigating the aesthetics and dramaturgy of historical and contemporary mutual aid societies, which will culminate in a participatory, public initiative that highlights how mutual aid contributes to belonging and othering and will problematize definitions of resiliency, community, and the rural radical.

Huidi Xiang

Huidi Xiang (b. Chengdu, China) is an artist and researcher. She holds an MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon University (2021) and a BA in Architecture and Studio Art from Rice University (2018).

In her art practice, Huidi makes sculptural objects, installations, and systems to examine world-making processes and the coexistence of multiple contexts and narratives in late capitalism. Her current work explores the spatial and temporal effects of inhabiting both the virtual and physical worlds. By rearranging, reimagining, and reconstructing elements from different contexts, including on- and off-line, she creates sculptural objects to construct a realm situating in between, intending to articulate the emerging politics and critical issues associated with the ever-expansive merging between the physical and the virtual, the real and the simulated, and the fact and the fiction.

Huidi’s works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including HUA International, Shenzhen, China, Miller ICA in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Center for Architecture and Design in New Orleans, LA, USA, and South London Gallery in London, UK. Huidi has also completed some artist residencies, including ACRE Residency Program(2021), the Millay Colony for the Arts (2020), and Project Row Houses Summer Studios (2016).

Laura Anzola & Matthew Waddell

Laura Anzola (b. Bogotá, Colombia) and Matthew Waddell (b. Calgary, Canada) have been Calgary-based collaborators for over seven years, creating work both under their own names, and through their collective Axis Z Media Arts (AZMA). They’ve conceived and generated multiple award-winning projects that scrutinize the relationship between human interaction and digital media, many of which have been presented at festivals, galleries, and theatre spaces across Canada.

New Media artist Laura Anzola examines and critiques the impact of technology on our daily lives and bodies, corporeal gestures, and global mobility, through unconventional applications of tech – adapted, hacked, and transformed. Her work often casts a skeptical eye on global societal issues using visual storytelling and interactive media. Her current project, Blue Borders, an audiovisual essay for dome projection, explores notions of home, identity, privilege and belonging. Laura’s work has been shown in galleries and public spaces in Colombia, Germany, and Canada.

Matthew Waddell is constantly seeking fresh and startling ways to examine how technology manipulates and warps our understanding and experience of the world, as well as our cultural and individual identities. With a creative practice at once organic and synthetic, his work blends images, animations, and interactive software programs to distort analog reality through a digital lens. The results are often uncanny: familiar yet otherworldly, and often profoundly disconcerting. Matthew’s recent projects have been showcased at the Alberta Gallery of Art (Edmonton), Eastern Bloc (Montreal), and the WRECK CITY Residency (Calgary)..

Orsolya Gal

Orsolya Gal (b. Cluj, Romania) completed her education at the faculty of architecture, followed by a masters in fine arts. The experience she gained during her Erasmus Placement scholarship in scenography, in Italy, and her collaboration with the scenographer Enrico Pulsoni in setting up the exhibition of Maria Signorelli's puppets in Rome, inspired an interest in puppetry. Looking for an alternative education in this field, in 2015 she became the student of Stathis Markopoulos, puppeteer and automata builder in Athens and graduated with her participation at the Kilkis Festival, in Greece, with a show using no puppets but gloves, to present a love story. This collaboration with Stathis Markopoulos and the architect Tiberiu Bucsa, led to another project: building and designing of six automatas with wooden puppets, called Selfie Automaton, that represented Romania in the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2016.

In 2017, June Orsolya participated at a one month workshop with Bruno Leone, Naples, where she helped produce the show, Pulcinella's Insomnia, which has traveled from Romania, to Hungary and Nairobi, Kenya. A workshop in 2018 on the theme of traditional shadow puppetry in India, Karnataka, gave birth to her new show for adults, Short Essay on Uncertainty which received a special prize at the Festival Incanti in Torino for image and sound design. This same experience connected her research in shadow theatre with her experimental work started in 2014, on plants in motion, a project which includes the observation and documentation of plants in movement, with the desire of creating a multidisciplinary work, involving fine arts and narrative in movement, essential in the field of theatre. She is based in Cluj, Romania.

Rhonda Weppler & Trevor Mahovsky

Rhonda Weppler and Trevor Mahovsky, based in New York and Toronto respectively, are artists who have worked collaboratively since 2004. Their work, laborious and handmade, is concerned with material culture and our relationship to the world of things. Their practice has increasingly incorporated aspects of craft that are communal and more broadly collaborative, such as the production of DIY tutorial videos, the distribution of source files for the making of versions of their works, the hosting of virtual crafting bees, and facilitating other collaborative public projects within and without institutional settings. Their current ongoing project, Crafts Abyss, produced in conjunction with and hosted by the Museum of Arts & Design, NYC, was first created during the 2020 edition of Contemporary Calgary’s Collider residency.

Other exhibitions include: National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), LABoral (Gijon), Dos de Mayo (Madrid), Aurora (Dallas), Vancouver Art Gallery, Flux Night (Atlanta), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Power Plant (Toronto), Musee d’art Contemporain de Montreal, Tokyo Wonder Site, loop-raum (Berlin), 516 Arts (Albuquerque), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), Alter Space (San Francisco), Glow (Washington DC). Mahovsky has written for journals such as Artforum and for catalogues such as Liz Magor (MACM: Montreal, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst: Zurich, and Hamburg Kunstverein). In 2017, Weppler was the inaugural artist in residence with the MFA Art Practice program at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and in 2018 she completed a major project for the Community Arts Initiative, Artists Project program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA.

stephanie mei huang

stephanie mei huang (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist. They use a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, social interventions, sculpture, writing, and painting. Through research and practice, they aim to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate exceptionalist narratives, in the hopes of excavating forgotten histories. They yearn to locate sites of emergence from which we can perhaps fabulate adjacent histories. They recently completed their MFA in Art at the California Institute of the Arts (2020), and they received their BA from Scripps College (2016). They most recently exhibited at the Hauser and Wirth Book Lab, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the New Wight Biennial at the University of California Los Angeles, and the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, AZ). They are a contributor to the Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. They are a participant at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.

Vishal Kumaraswamy

Vishal Kumaraswamy is an artist based in Bangalore. He works with text, film, sound, performance & computational arts moving between theoretical references, news media & caste realities. Over the last three years, Vishal has been actively engaged in the development of a critical pedagogical framework titled Subaltern Futurism, a container for artistic research, practice and the technological education of contextualised subaltern communities. 

Vishal’s works have been shown at several international exhibitions including The Venice Biennale’s Research Pavilion, Athens Digital Arts Festival, CCS Bard College, Vector Festival, The Royal College of Art & Furtherfield and are distributed by VIVO Media Arts, Vancouver. He has previously been an artist in residence with the US Consulate General Mumbai, Contemporary Calgary in Alberta, SAVAC Toronto, Vital Capacities videoclub UK & Onassis AiR. Vishal is a recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Transmitter Delhi X Darwin Grant & the Warehouse421 Artistic Research Grant (2021) and is a 2022 Research Associate at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry. Vishal is currently developing works for SITE Gallery Sheffield, & Contemporary Calgary, Canada.

Vishal is the founder of the international artist collective; Now You Have Authority (www.nyhacollective.com), a collaborative practice through which he has curated exhibitions, residencies, and delivered workshops at the Tate Modern’s Tate Exchange Programme, Tanzfest Aarau and The Sluice Biennial. He also develops independent curatorial projects with a focus on contemporary South-Asian artistic practices and his most recent project www.the-lack-of.com was shown as part of The Wrong Biennale in 2019-2020.

Yotam Peled

Yotam Peled (b. Kibbutz, North Israel) has since childhood practiced fine arts, athletics, and Capoeira. At the age of 21, after finishing service in the Israeli defense forces, he began dancing, and then pursued higher education in contemporary circus. In 2015, Yotam relocated to Berlin, where he has been working as a freelance performer with several European choreographers, among them Maura Morales, Yann L'hereux, Troels Primdahl, Jill Crovisier and Mitia Fedotenko. Alongside performing he has been creating his own choreographic work, touring festivals and venues in Israel, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Norway, North Macedonia, Luxembourg, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam. His solo performance ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ has received awards from Awaji Circus Art, Wurzburg tanzSpeicher, MASDANZA, Gdansk Dance festival and Corpomobile Rome. His first ensemble work ‘Entropia’ was created in 2018, as part of ‘THINK BIG’ - a collaboration of the city opera of Hanover and TANZtheater International festival. 

In 2018, Yotam was selected to the prestigious TalentLAB platform in the Grand Theatre of Luxembourg, to create 'ALPHA', with his ensemble ‘Yotam Peled & the Free Radicals’, in a residency mentored by choreographer Hofesh Shechter. In November 2019 he was a resident choreographer in Skopje Dance Theater and created ‘The Tragedy of the Tiger Beetle’, with the 13 members of the company. Over 2020/21 he will create new works for the graduates of EDCM, Canada, and Frontier Danceland, Singapore.