The photographs of four people in circle shaped frames against a purple backdrop, with Squeaky Wheel's logo and the words "Workspace Residents. Spring 2025." The four people, left to right, are G. Anthony Svatek, Kaija Siirala, Kyla Kegler, and Sue Ding.

Squeaky Wheel announces Spring 2025 Workspace Residents

January 23, 2025

Media Contact: Ekrem Serdar, ekrem@squeaky.org

G. Anthony Svatek & Kaija Siirala, Kyla Kegler, and Sue Ding will receive support for media arts projects and lead public events and workshops as part of the Workspace Residency

BUFFALO, NY — Squeaky Wheel is pleased to announce the awardees of the spring 2025 Workspace Residency. From Friday, April 4 through Saturday, April 19, 2025, the residency will provide G. Anthony Svatek & Kaija Siirala (Brooklyn, NY and Hamilton, ON), Kyla Kegler (Buffalo, NY) and Sue Ding (Los Angeles, CA) with tailored access to equipment, technical and curatorial consultations towards their work on new and ongoing projects at Squeaky Wheel, including an artist talk and workshops.

Director G. Anthony Svatek & editor and sound designer Kaija Siirala will be working on the post-production of Humboldt USA, an experimental documentary about the legacy of 19th century queer German geographer Alexander von Humboldt. Long before today’s globalized world – rapid travel, the internet, artificial intelligence, etc. – Humboldt made a radical proposal while reflecting on his travels through the Americas: nature as “one great whole,” an interconnected web-of-life. His ideas planted the seeds for Western environmentalism and information science, earning him such global notoriety that no other person’s name has been given to as many places, species, and things – none of which Humboldt ever saw or named himself. The film was shot in three locations across the United States, including Buffalo’s Humboldt Parkway, with key protagonist Terry Robinson of the East Side Parkways Coalition, highlighting the community’s struggle against solidifying the expressway with the “toxic tunnel” project, as proposed by the New York State Department of Transportation.

Kyla Kegler will be working on Care-Core, a multi-channel video installation examining self-care, collective care, somatic knowledge, and utopian responses to individualistic culture. Drawing on historical, contemporary, and embodied care practices, the project will explore how people want to give and receive care, imagining post-capitalistic and sustainable structures for interdependent living. The research considers the tension and incongruities between collective ideals and individualistic agendas; between ego and altruism. It investigates the mechanisms of human prosperity and happiness — mapping alternative ways of living with and for one another in the face of an ever escalating global eco- political catastrophe.

Sue Ding will be working on The Spectacle of Her Appetites, a two-channel video installation exploring female hunger and its portrayal on screen. Appropriating footage from popular films and television, the project interrogates the cinematic language of women and food, tracing intersections of desire, shame, and discipline.

The public will have the opportunity to attend events and workshops led by the residents on four occasions. Event details will be shared in the coming weeks. Panelists for this session of the residency were Dena Kopolovich, Dorothea Braemer, and Saif Alsaegh. Biographies of the residents and panelists can be found below.

Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency supports artists and researchers working on media arts projects. The program attracts practitioners who make challenging and critical inquiries to media art: its possibilities, histories, and the communities it can hold and form. Since its inception in 2016, the program has supported projects by over 50 artists, filmmakers, scholars, and curators. Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is supported by Teiger Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and additional support by the County of Erie and County Executive Mark Poloncarz, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the office of Governor and the New York State Legislature. Special thank you to Kiesha Lillian Adamczyk-Bennett at Faith Real Estate Services, Inc. and William Marcus Bennett at Bennett Home Inspection for sponsoring this session of the residency. Learn more about the program here: squeaky.org/workspace-residency

Biographies of the residents

G. Anthony Svatek and Kaija Siirala

Having grown up at the foot of the Austrian Alps, G. Anthony Svatek is awed by the living world and how it is increasingly impacted by our techno-urban lives. Anthony’s work screened at NYFF, Intl FF Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Big Sky, Prismatic Ground, DOCNYC, amongst others. Supporters include NYSCA, Simons Foundation, Austrian Cultural Forum NY. He is the recipient of the New Visions Golden Gate Award at SFFILM. Commissioned work includes projects for NYS Parks, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and Pioneer Works. He has staffed seasonally at the Flaherty Film Seminar, The Climate Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Kaija Siirala works in documentary media as a picture editor, sound designer and educator. She has a keen interest in process-based collaboration and storytelling that pushes against the bounds of classical narrative structures. Films she has worked on have screened at the National Gallery of Canada, True/False Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, MoMI First Look, Hot Docs, DOC NYC, Big Sky, AFI fest, IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Flaherty Seminar 2023, Prismatic Ground and as a New York Times Op-Doc. Her audio work has appeared on the BBC, On Air Fest and in installation contexts. She was a member-in-residence of the Meerkat Media Collective in Brooklyn, NY from 2016-2018. In May 2018, she completed her MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College (CUNY) and is now based in Hamilton, ON.

A black and white photo of Kyla Kegler

Kyla Kegler is an artist and filmmaker who’s work explores desire and connection between people, place and purpose. She is the founder and director of performance / movement space Agatha Falls. Kegler’s practice draws from her past work with Bread and Puppet Theater (Vermont) and as co-founder of theater, “Zuhause” (Berlin, Germany). She received an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship from the Art University of Berlin and an MFA in Studio Art from the University at Buffalo. Her past projects include: Feel Me, video installation exploring the mindfulness industry; The House on Fire Show, teen web-drama about the climate crisis; Mountains: a tragicomedic puppet soap opera; Relationships don’t finish, they change, a video and sculpture installation exhibited at the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, 2024.

A photograph of Sue Ding, an East Asian woman wearing black shirt.

Sue Ding is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores race, gender, and diaspora through the lens of visual culture. In her research-based practice, she emphasizes process, form, and deep readings of both media and landscapes. Sue’s work has screened internationally at venues including SXSW, IDFA, Antimatter [Media Art], and Copenhagen Contemporary, and can be found on platforms including PBS, Netflix, and The New York Times. Sue’s interdisciplinary practice spans film, installation, and emerging media, and she consults and lectures widely on filmmaking and media arts. In 2023, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

Biographies of the panelists

Dena Kopolovich is a multimedia artist, filmmaker & educator from New York. Her recent work has been featured in programs at the Visual Studies Workshop, Mono No Aware, Made in NY Media Center by IFP and Counter Collective. She received her education from the Purchase College Conservatory of Theater Arts and the Integrated Media Arts MFA program at Hunter College. Dena was a participant in the Squeaky Wheel Spring 2023 Workspace Residency Program.

Dorothea Braemer: I am an interdisciplinary, socially engaged artist working with media, dollhouses, masks, social gatherings, cooking, meals and other activities that bring people together. I believe in art as a catalyst for positive social change and use video as an intimate language to explore the world around me. I am inspired by my family and pets, my students at Buffalo State University, my friends, activists, small grassroots arts organizations, climate justice initiatives, and going for walks. I am an Associate Professor in media production at Buffalo State University and was born in Germany.

Saif Alsaegh is a United States-based filmmaker from Baghdad. Much of Saif’s work deals with the contrast between the landscape of his youth in Baghdad growing up as part of the indigenous Chaldean minority in the nineties and early 2000s, and the U.S. landscape where he currently lives. His films have screened in festivals and venues including Cinéma du Réel, Kurzfilm Hamburg, Kassel Dokfest, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and The Gene Siskel Film Center. Alsaegh’s films are distributed by Video Data Bank. His work has been supported by fellowships and residencies including Squeaky Wheel, Flaherty, Ucross and Yaddo.