As we bring our summer residency season to a close, we invite you to join us for an intimate evening to meet five 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 Esther Lu, Victor Sonna, Nikolett Balázs, María Gabler,  Gulnoza Irgasheva, and Nainvi Vora. 

PRESENTATIONS 

Esther Lu (Dining Room)
20:00–20:15
This poem reflects Esther’s residency at Delfina, exploring how we live, learn, and relate amid ecological and social crises. Expanding the notion of relational entropy, she reflects on fragile bonds with humans and more-than-humans, proposing a mode of learning that resists collapse and fosters kinship and love.

Victor Sonna (Library)
All evening
Constructed from  54 x-rays, metallic figures reminiscent of Greek Tamata, and symbolic elements drawn from the Bamum part of what is now northwest Cameroon, Victor’s work emerges as a layered, organic form: one that evokes a continent, a city, a body, or a memory, yet resists clear definition.

María Gabler (Project Space)
All evening
During her residency, Maria investigated the complex web of structural power, invisible labour and architectural tradition imprinted upon London’s bricks, common elements of the built environment. While once made from locally sourced clay, today’s London stock bricks bear the textured memory of hands from Pakistan and India.For this Open Studios María presents different mediums of documentation of this ongoing research.

Nainvi Vora (Project Space)
All evening
This curated project explores Pilloo Pochkhanawala’s (1923–86) sculptural practice through archival and contemporary photographs. Juxtapositions with landscapes from Bombay and St Ives, alongside resonances with Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, reveal how Pochkhanawala’s work engaged ancient forms, ecological sensibilities, and the urban modernity of post-independence India.

Nikolett Balázs (Project Space)
All evening
Nikolett Balázs emphasizes a unique moment we tend to forget: an unmasked, naked self right before we try to modify it. The objects on the floor represents the variety of this method, the exposed textile is ready to surrender to this act. The artist uses the Open Studio event to examine her working process and seek for deeper understanding and sacracity in everyday moments.

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Presenting Residents

Esther Lu’s (Taiwan) curatorial practice explores how to build resilience toward collective metabolic recovery through engagement with both humans and the more-than-human world. Her work is rooted in collaboration, transdisciplinary research, and alternative learning; cultivating art as a medium for care, exchange, and transformative experiences in everyday life. 

Victor Sonna’s (Cameroon/Netherlands) artistic practice is closely intertwined with his personal history: negotiating between Cameroon and the Netherlands means he is always occupied with the struggle of holding onto his African roots on the one hand and integrating into his European home on the other. This duality runs like a thread through all his work. Where both worlds and continents collide is something he explores in paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations. 

Nikolett Balázs’ (Hungary) textile sculptures inhabit space with ordered formality — completing the existing world. Their rippling folds, which open and close like flowers, intertwine many layers of meaning beyond feminist vulva symbolism; from folkloric tulip motifs to totemic individuality on flayed skin. Her artworks go all the way down to the roots and into the deep, embedded in the story of our own age and personal mythologies.

María Gabler (Chile) creates site-responsive works, including temporary installations and sculptures made from construction materials and debris, that critically engage with their surroundings. Her practice begins from the idea that the built environment is not merely a passive container for human activity, but is intrinsically tied to ideologies, power dynamics, and social organisation. She has primarily developed her work through architectural site-specific interventions, where she explores the socio-political dimensions of space by developing constructive solutions that replicate or transform existing spatial elements, altering the way they are perceived and experienced.  

Nainvi Vora (India) is an art historian and Associate Curator at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), whose curatorial practice focuses on feminist, ecological, and material histories in South Asian modern and contemporary art. Her work bridges rigorous academic research with institutional exhibition-making and pedagogical programming. She is particularly invested in recovering overlooked sculptural practices by women artists in post-independence India. 

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Our summer 2025 residency partners and supporters include: Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Tate, Delfina Foundation’s Network of Central Asia Patrons, Mondriaan Fonds, Delfina Foundation’s Network of Central and Eastern Europe Patrons, Artus Chile, Ministry of Culture, Taiwan (R.O.C.), Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Direct Grant for Research by CUHK.

* Event title taken from poems by Esther Lu