An intimate, dreamy evening of performances, video installations, and 1:1 encounters. 

This season the Delfina house welcomes 12 artists from London and around the world to explore how emergent technologies complicate our understanding of mental wellbeing, as part of our periodic theme science_technology_society. 

Join us for a ‘house party’ to experience new and in-development projects that intersect art and technology to imagine new landscapes for mental health justice and care. Participating artists-in-residence include Abdul Halik Azeez, Anna Costa e Silva, Gabriella Hirst, Ali Akbar Mehta, Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab. Drinks and refreshments will be provided. 

Encounters 

Abdul Halik Azeez, based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, is a multidisciplinary artist and organizer whose work examines the intersections of colonialism, neoliberalism, memory-making, and identity politics. He will present research materials and ephemera from All the things you could have been by now if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother—a work-in-progress that explores madness, radicalism, and the specter of the Other through the lenses of public media, jazz music, and Sri Lankan folk theatre.
(Project Space, all evening) 

Anna Costa e Silva  works with radical listening and encounter experiences that open up space for vulnerability and dialogue. She is interested in the tensions between personal stories and collective memory, trauma and fantasy – specifically how one shouts and how one whispers. Her projects unfold as immersive installations, films, choreographies and ephemeral experiences that exist in the borders of documentary, fiction, dream and imagination. For Night of Encounters, Anna offers a spoken word experience somewhere in between storytelling, performance and music that speaks about love and neoliberalism. Dystopian dream narratives, companion devices, a hyper-stimulated eye, Tamagotchis, Harmony, madness, the hidden sounds of women…Written and performed by Anna Costa e Silva, feat. music by Nina Miranda.
(Dining Room, 18:30-18:45, 19:15-19:30, 20:00-20:15). In between performances, there will be screenings of the video Tamagotchi_ballet, 2023.

Gabriella Hirst’s research is currently focused upon exploring experiences of political, psychological and museological stasis. For Night of Encounters, she is sharing her work in progress Seeking Stillness, a meditation on the fraught search for inner and outer calm.
(Project Space, all evening)

Ali Akbar Mehta is a Transmedia artist, curator, researcher, and writer. He examines narratives drawn from zones of conflict and dominant power structures, creating immersive, interactive archival projects. He will be presenting his ongoing project, purgatory EDIT. It is a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience based on the artist-assembled media archive (online at https://www.purgatoryedit.com) containing 50,000+ entries representing contemporary violence, conflict, and trauma. It invites participants to investigate the archive using their own emotional, neurological and cognitive agency, via a brain-computer interface (BCI) and software developed by the artist.
(Project Space, all evening with limited slots. Booking required on the spot.) 

Caroline Sinders and Romy Gad el Rab are artists and researchers who have been collaborating since 2019. Together, they combine expertise in human rights technology, clinical experience in technology addictions, and design to create public interventions that explore the human impact of large-scale technology systems, centering care and human agency. Romy and Caroline will present Body-Phone-Complex. Does your phone feel like an extension of your body? And if it were taken away would it feel like a part of you were missing? or would you feel lighter? Join Romy and Caroline for 1:1 sessions, a guided exploration of how phone use may influence your mental wellbeing. Contribute your anonymised thoughts to their ongoing project exploring new languages and models of technology ‘addictions and anxieties’.

(Office, all evening with limited slots. Booking required on the spot.)

*Please note this is an artistic intervention, and Romy is unable to provide 1:1 medical advice in this capacity.

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With thanks to the residency supporters of the participating artists: The Keir Foundation, Goethe-Institut UK, The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland, Instituto Inclusartiz, George Keyt Foundation, and Delfina Foundation’s Network of Patrons for the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.