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Monica Tolia (she/they), aka Monica Tolia Fong 方美嘉, is a London-based visual artist and communer / mother / shifter / performer. Their work is rooted in an animistic & neurodivergent worldview, practicing queer feminist kinship & intimate entanglements across human & more-than-human worlds. Their work engages in a polysensorial vocabulary related to their diasporic inheritance — spanning performance, social practice, sculpture and sound — to critically reflect on the terms of agency, connection and self-determination under conditions of global capitalism. From 2021-2023, they were part of the ESEA diaspora collective Have you eaten yet?, organising performance-based events and collaborations in the locale of Deptford on the intersections of food, migration, art/activism & creating affectionate space. Following a period of autistic burnout and de-presencing from 2023–2026, since returning to practice in 2026 their current studio development works with inherited craft traditions and a strategy of material proxies: re-working everyday mass commodities into porous thresholds. These works deploy simulation, camouflage, and tactile craft to explore the frictions between preservation, rest, and quiet refusal, grounding transnational movement in structures of alternative worlding. |
Image credit: Phoenix Tanner
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