Yolanda Ren/任翊嘉 (she/her/tā) is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Chicago working with performance, installation, and interactivity. She integrates altered everyday objects, projections, moving images, and text into her works.
Her art is grounded in an understanding that alienation and disconnection in contemporary life are not problems that originate within individuals or their private lives, but conditions shaped by the broader socio-political landscape, particularly neoliberal capitalism.
So, her art takes place in the public sphere, where she draws attention to the rigid, bureaucratic, and commodified realities of this system from angles both big and small: from referencing philosophical theories that invite viewer response to drawing on her experiences as an immigrant, a critic of art institutions, a resident of this land and a participants in social and political life, among the many labels that name who she is.
Through absurdity, spectacle, silliness, and playfulness, she turns this attention into a challenge to existing social norms, plasticizing these realities so they can surface and begin to move.
She is currently an MFA Performance candidate at the School of Art Institute Chicago, having had a BA at the University of Toronto, specializing in Philosophy with a minor in Visual Studies.