2025 Open Call Winner and Finalists
Open Source Gallery is pleased to announce our 2025 selected artist through our annual open call. This year we received nearly 500 applications from artists around the world. Our jurors, Petrina Ng and Khaled Jarrar, carefully considered each submission and selected Yu Shuk Pui Bobby (余淑培) for a solo exhibition in 2025.
Yu Shuk Pui Bobby (余淑培) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Hong Kong and Oslo. Bobby’s practice is focused on building intimate relationships and collaborations, where physical, tangible and affective phenomena associated with body politics and the future are created by the media of video, text, installation, sculpture, and performance.
Her project “Genetic Salon” use speculative fiction within the themes of human genetic engineering to refigure perceptions towards gender, body and historical discourses of identity. In recent years, Bobby has started to work on video making with different communities as a means of exploring identity construction in various cultural contexts and collective aspects. Through intertwining semi-fictional narratives, she describe memory and experiences of identification.
Bobby received a BA from Hong Kong Baptist University and MFA at Oslo National Academy of Fine Art. She has exhibited her works at Parasite, 100ft. Gallery, starprojects, 1a Space, Tomorrow Maybe Gallery, EC Gallery (Hong Kong);Kunstnernes Hus, Galleri BOA, Podium, K4 Gallery(Oslo); A Place Gallery & Studios (Florida); Youkobo Art Space Gallery (Tokyo); Swatch Art Peach Hotel (Shanghai); Listhus Gallery (Iceland).
Our 2025 Open Call Finalists
Our jurors also selected five finalists: Stefania Urist, Ran Xinan, E. Elhoffer, Nsenga Knight, and Liz Ensz.
Stefania Urist
Stefania Urist’s artwork explores the entangled yet fraught relationship between humans and the environment through extensive scientific research and material investigation to educate, motivate, and question current systems that overuse and abuse plants, land, water, and the environment. She uses natural materials frequently combined with recycled industrial materials as a method to create art sustainably, ethically, and honorably while mitigating environmental issues surrounding human caused climate change. Urist is interested in material and temporal processes of industry and capitalism and their interaction with the planet because it is imperative for the future of the health of every species to change the status quo.
Urist earned her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022, BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013, and has attended many artist residencies and fellowships. Her dedication and skills are evident in the numerous grants and awards she has received to create new work in solo and group shows internationally and sculpture gardens across the US. Currently based in Londonderry, VT, Urist continues to create new work that challenges and inspires audiences to consider their relationship with the natural world.
Xinan Ran
Xinan Helen Ran (b. 1994. Inner Mongolia, China) is an artist who specializes in fabric, language, and found objects to construct emotional landscapes. She searches for the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge. Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by the New York Magazine Matrix, Xinan is a 2024 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, was a mentee in New York Foundation for the Arts’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program (2023), a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center resident (2022), and an Ox-Bow Summer Fellow (2016). Apart from her studio practice, Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator and an aspirational set designer for new theaters. www.xinanran.work
E. Elhoffer
E. Elhoffer is an interdisciplinary artist who makes bizarre and visceral work. They earned their undergraduate degree from Kansas City Art Institute and are an MFA candidate at the Sam Fox School of Art & Design at Washington University. They live and work in St. Louis, Missouri, where they actively grapple with political adversity regarding their nonmale, nonbinary body. Elhoffer exhibits in galleries, museums and institutions nationally and internationally.
Elhoffer’s work deals with themes that affect their body, such as the contemporary gaze cast upon it and mind-body dysphoria. Their pieces examine the ways in which societal norms, virtual space, and power structures shape one’s understanding of their bodily identity. Through their art, Elhoffer invites viewers to question their own assumptions and consider alternative ways of living within one’s own flesh.
Nsenga Knight’s artwork focuses on abstraction, community engaged social practice, and Black history archives – especially related to Black Muslims. Through the experience of looking at/participating in my work, she is inviting my audiences to challenge traditional boundaries of race, nationhood, and religion and create wholly new constructions that broaden our collective imaginations.
Nsenga Knight (b. Brooklyn, New York, 1981) earned an MFA from University of Pennsylvania and a BA from Howard University. She has exhibited her work internationally, including: Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, Egypt (2022); BRIC Arts, Brooklyn, NY (2019); AIR Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019); Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017, 2016); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2016); Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2015); Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY (2015); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2012); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (2011); Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn, NY (2009); among others. Knight is a recipient of grants from Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2019), Foundation for Contemporary Art (2016), Brooklyn Arts Council (2007). She was an artist-in-residence at BRICworkspace, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and Film/Video Arts Center, New York, NY (2005) among others. She lives and works in New York.
My research examines the designed and found icons of the American character in search of our underlying values and our aspirations as individuals and as a society. These ideals are visible as monumental forms, but also camouflaged in mundane ubiquity. Themes within the work – the economic flows of resources, moral and material conundrums, and the legacy of settler colonialism and empire – are touchstones that constellate to destabilize and complicate what may have been seen as American foundational ideals.
I present a comparative study of the mass-cultural investment in disposability alongside the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and self-celebration. While disparate intentions inform these impulses- one to remember, and the other to quickly forget- each will materially describe our society to future generations. Influenced by this paradox and theories of the Sublime, I explore the complexities of the American landscape and the ways in which the constructed environment rivals that of the natural environment. Our physical material footprint will outlive the emblems designed to signify our political and moral ideals to stand as our lasting cultural monument. These Anthropocene-Era Commemoratives contrast human-scale and geological-scale time and space as part of the continual unfolding and cycling of matter and the transformation of landscape.
