As we bring our autumn residency season to a close, we invite you to join us for an intimate evening to meet four of our current residents and gain insight into their creative practices.

This drop-in event offers the chance to meet our current residents and experience new, existing, and in-development works presented across the Delfina house by Rai, Ana Bravo-Pérez, Lai Fei, and Yeser Berro.

PRESENTATIONS 

Yeser Berro (Dining Room)
19:30–19:45
Mammals is a short story from Yeser’s book Night Swimming. During his Delfina residency, Yeser worked on self-translating the book from Arabic to English, and wrote Mammals as the collection’s concluding story. Set in the forests of Syria, it follows a father in hiding who writes letters to his son, as memories, dreams, and animal life begin to merge.

Rai (Project Space)
All evening
This constellation of thoughts explores the feeling of finding one’s place while feeling out of place. Drawing from Rai’s research on Asian seafarers’ lodging houses and her own encounters around the city, the installation brings together gestures and pockets of warmth, images from the Thames river banks, imagined archival carbon blue impressions of Shah Jalal Café/Ayub Ali Dining, stories around rocks, and a small game with stones taught by Amina from the Siddi community in Baichvad (Karnataka), played over tea.

Lai Fei (Project Space)
All evening
Queering the People’s Park is an ongoing research project exploring the layered queer geographies of public parks, with a particular focus on China and its delicate sociopolitical context. Weaving together personal histories, rumours, fabulations, and visual documentation, the project seeks to preserve traces of lived queer experiences before they are erased or forgotten. Content warning: Please be advised that the film contains scenes of violence that viewers might find distressing.

Ana Bravo-Pérez (Project Space)
All evening
Our bodies, our territories (work in process) is driven by questions of how to visualise the reciprocal relationships between birds, water bodies, and their territories, and the agency these Earth beings hold in co‑creating the living cloud forests they inhabit. Influenced by research during Ana’s residency, the artist was moved to reflect on their personal archive and expand on the concept of body-territory. The film invites meditation on our intrinsic and mutual relationships with our territories and with the communities of all Earth beings we share our lands with. A series of research materials and textile works act as an extension of the film. The artist asks, how can we practice care while facing ecological destruction?

—

Presenting Residents

Rai’s (India) practice moves through making as a way to absorb, reflect, and speculate; interconnecting found materials, research, memory, and fiction to explore themes of spatial negotiation, permeability, and the currents between recollection and amnesia. Her work engages with estuarine geographies, evoking amphibious perspectives/identities and their possibilities across image, text, and installation.

Ana Bravo-Pérez (Abya Yala/Colombia/Netherlands) is an artist and filmmaker. Her work draws on migration, memory and violence. She uses her own migratory and diasporic experiences as a starting point for her artistic projects investigating suppressed narratives and collective histories. These experiences have been crucial for building an artistic practice in which personal, decolonial and geopolitical questions merge.

Lai Fei (China) is an editor, art critic, translator, and researcher who has spent the past 11 years editing art magazines, including LEAP (since 2014) and the Chinese edition of ArtReview  (since 2022).

Yeser Berro (Syria) is a multidisciplinary artist who works across literature, photography, and film.

—

Our autumn 2025 residency partners and supporters include: The Charles Wallace India Trust, The Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation, Asymmetry, Contemporary Bolivian Arts Trust, Fundación RSV, Delfina’s Network of Latin America & Caribbean Patrons, Delfina Foundation’s Network of Patrons for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, The Brooks International Fellowship Programme in partnership with Tate, Rambourg Foundation, Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation and Mondriaan Fonds.