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

This drop-in event offers the chance to talk to the artists and curators in person and experience new, existing, and in-development works presented across the Delfina house by Hatem Imam, Sidra Khawaja, Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz, Pei-Chi Lee, Anna Russell, Karan Shrestha, and Verovcha.

PRESENTATIONS 

Anna Russell and Pei-Chi Lee (Library)
All evening
A Seat on Circular Road uses the repair of a found broken chair to explore manual labour in Pakistan, where traditional methods and manual skills remain integral to everyday life and industry. It examines the informal, inconsistent systems of measurement often employed in these settings — where a worker’s hand span or length from nose to arm can define a unit, resulting in inevitable variations. 

The film was made at the Barkat Ali Islamia Hall in Lahore’s Old City during the Divvy Delfina Residency, supported by Foundation Art Divvy, Delfina Foundation, and the British Council. 

Hatem Imam (Project Space Courtyard)
All evening
In this open studio, Hatem Imam experiments with expanding the space and time of drawing with sound. Stemming from landscape and abstract painting traditions, he invites the viewer to consider the way we negotiate a relationship with place through representation. This relationship—being born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother—manifests in dreamscapes that speak in tongues, and where desire, guilt, pleasure, and shame collide.   

Karan Shrestha (Project Space)
20:00 – 20:30
Chitwan National Park was established in 1973 after being a popular destination for hunting and trade amongst Nepal’s royalty and British colonists. Since then, it has become the face of biodiversity protection and tourism development. This comes at the expense of the livelihood of indigenous communities such as the Bote, Majhi, Musahar, Kumal, Chepang and Tharu. They have faced evictions, loss of land, arrests, torture and sexual assault by Nepal’s armed forces.  

stealing earth addresses how the rhetoric of conservation is used to enclose land, forest and water for the wealthy and powerful, while disenfranchising communities that have shared a symbiotic relationship with these habitats for centuries. 

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz (Dining Room)
18:30 – 19:00
Khaymaz’s lecture performance takes us deep into the heart of the Algerian desert, to the Tassili n’Ajjer plateau. Famous for its Neolithic rock paintings, Tassili has been, since the early twentieth century, the target of numerous expeditions aimed at discovering and documenting its much-talked-about rock art. The performance presents a reckoning with the researcher’s moral dilemma, showing that as one digs further into the research histories surrounding Tassilian art, the picture that emerges is one of destruction, despoilment, disenfranchisement, and cultural erasure. The question Khaymaz then asks: Do we, in our quest for knowledge, refrain from stepping into Indigenous realms foreign to us, lest we taint the very thing we seek? 

Sidra Khawaja (Project Space and Dining Room)
All evening, with screening and Q&A from 19:15 – 19:45 
Sidra Khawaja will screen a short documentary Longing for Paradise: Map Shawl of Kashmir. It explores the intersection of cultural preservation and sociopolitical narratives through the personal journey of a freedom fighter-turned-craftsman within the turbulent context of complex geopolitics, resistance, displacement, and ecological exploitations in Kashmir. The documentary serves to record silenced Kashmiri voices while divulging the overlooked costs of postcolonial nationalism. Additionally, she will curate a participatory tablescape around the notions of food culture and identity, serving as an ethnographic artifact and encouraging the public to partake in the co-creation process.  

Verovcha (Project Space)
All evening 
Through her work, Verovcha reimagines the body as an open, collective metabolism that emerges from cosmologies of mutual care. She is engaged with encoded understandings of the universe apparent in the prehistoric landscape. Where stones are not only markers of celestial events but are embedded into our present bodies. 

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Participating Artists  

Anna Russell (United Kingdom) is an architectural designer and artist from London, currently working at Architecture practice Assemble. Her practice focuses on the sociopolitical impact of architecture and its role in facilitating or inhibiting the way we live and our right to the city. She explore these concepts through drawing, model-making, textiles and film. 

Hatem Imam (Lebanon/Palestine) explores the ways in which we use representation to negotiate a relationship with place. Through painting, printmaking, installation, and sound, his work looks at the space and materiality of dreams, and constructs scenes in which desire, shame, pleasure, and guilt collide. In his works, the landscape is a starting point; his works foreground their own materiality, understanding these materials as being lifted from one landscape and being shaped and reformed into another. 

Karan Shrestha’s (Nepal/India) practice includes drawings, sculpture, photographs, films and texts that speak to the complex, entangled relations of Nepal’s recent history. Shrestha presents works that are an archive of the terrain, political histories, and transient memories, and a speculative world that suspends reality, to question ideas of progress while drawing connections to the ecological, cultural and socio-economical dimensions of Nepali life. 

Pei-Chi Lee’s (Taiwan/United Kingdom) work explores the impact of culture and infrastructure on human behaviour, emphasizing geopolitics, public space, and our sense of control for our everyday environment. Through site-specific installations, she uncover hidden stories in everyday details, encouraging viewers to embrace a playful and interconnected way of being beyond traditional gallery spaces. 

Sheyda Aisha Khaymaz (Turkey/USA) is an artist, curator, poet, and PhD candidate in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin, specialising in modern and contemporary art from the north of Africa. Their doctoral dissertation, ‘Indigenous Presentness: Translocal Politics of Amazigh Art and Resistance’, focuses on the manifold expressions of indigeneity and Indigenous philosophies in art and explores the nexus between Amazigh artistic expression and sovereignty movements across the Indigenous territories known as Tamazgha. The project theorises the innovative artistic forms that emerged in the region after the 1960s, particularly sign- and script-based abstraction, a form deeply rooted in ancient practices like tattooing and rock-engraving, as a mode of decolonising praxis. 

Sidra Khawaja (Pakistan) is an interdisciplinary creative practitioner, educator, researcher and a Fulbright scholar. Her practice thrives at the intersection of design, craft, anthropology and cultural exploration. She weaves narratives bridging sociopolitical and cultural contexts through interactive public experiences using objects, installations, archives, and multimedia. Her work critically delves into material culture, sparking dialogue on decolonisation, identity, representation, ecofeminism and climate change. 

Verovcha (Peru) aims to conceive the body through tantric geometry, viewing it as a vehicle that transcends its own illusion of separateness. Her work seeks to find patterns that can figuratively reconnect us and inspire a sense of unity that dismantles the perceived boundaries between individual beings. 

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With thanks to the residency supporters of the participating artists: Art Design Lebanon, British Council Pakistan, Foundation Art Divvy, The Brooks International Fellowship Programme, Tate, Artus Peru, Wellcome Collection, and Delfina Foundation’s regional patron network for Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.

* Event title taken from Hatem Imam’s work Slumber’s Tongues (2023).