Unknowness is the Way*

Image: A preliminary sketch by artist-in-residence Pilar Elgueta, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

As we bring our summer residency season to a close, we invite you to join us for an afternoon to meet nine of our current residents and UK Associates, and gain an 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 Daniah Alsaleh, Han Mengyun, Kvet Nguyen, Madhushree Kamak, Mohammad Al Faraj, Pilar Elgueta, Peyman Shafieezadeh, Shenece Oretha, and Tara Al Dughaither.

Presentations

Daniah Alsaleh (Project Space)
All afternoon
In the Lens of the Beholder is Daniah’s current research in progress on mobile cameras’ influence on public and private performances, focusing on how the presence of these devices alters behaviour during street performances, concerts, and private gatherings. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, Daniah investigates the tension between authentic self-expression and the discomfort of feeling observed. Her research reflects on how the constant possibility of being recorded shapes social interactions and affects the vibrancy of public life.

Han Mengyun (Project Space)
All afternoon
Following the recent premiere of her video installation Night Sutra at the Busan Biennale 2024, Mengyun presents a non-narrative video and textile installation exploring themes of intersectionality and coexistence. The work integrates still and moving images, text, and fabric, featuring footage of classical dance filmed in Cambodia, nature imagery that inspired the choreography, and poems written by Mengyun, narrated by her daughter. The installation is adorned with cloth scrolls printed with Indian woodblock patterns.

Madhushree Kamak (Dining Room)
Presentation at 15:00 – 15:20
Madhushree will give a short talk ‘Hacking the museum’. From multi-sensory immersive experiences to artificial intelligence–technology is rapidly changing what a museum or gallery experience feels like. Madhushree will explore interesting case studies from her research at Tate, on how emerging technologies are changing the way we experience cultural spaces and how audiences feel about it.

Kvet Nguyen (Project Space)
All afternoon
Kvet explores the ways voiceless objects, people, and things can speak to us through archives and testimonials. She focuses on archives that reveal missing parts of our stories, potentially bringing forgotten voices to life for the first time or in new ways. A central element in her exploration is the babettas, famous motorcycles made in Czechoslovakia during the state-socialist regime. These motorcycles became a popular item for Vietnamese guest workers in the 1970s and 1980s, often sent to Vietnam disassembled and reassembled upon arrival. Kvet examines what these shapes and objects represent today.

Mohammad Al Faraj (Project Space Courtyard)
All afternoon, with participatory performance at 17:00 – 17:10
“I will try to open up a poem and let you inside it, as if it exploded and you are walking between its pieces”. Mohammad’s multimedia installation, Hands of Yakut, is a collage of materials, words, and images resisting and rebelling against its own form. Branches with cardboard palms grow from the solid ground, dancing in the air. Newspapers drape the wall with palm trees in the colour of blood rubies or the red of the sun burning, announcing a season where the days are bright.

Pilar Elgueta (Entrance & Project Space)
All afternoon
Pilar will display a new site-specific version of Bodies of Water: prologue as a video and sound installation, accompanied by views of her current research project, The Preservation of the Unpreservable Society. This multimedia presentation opens a conversation on the human condition from a post-anthropological perspective, exploring themes of resistance, futility, impermanence, and care.

Peyman Shafieezadeh (Project Space)
All afternoon
Drawing information from the short story “Aql-e-Surkh” (The Red Intellect) by the Iranian philosopher and thinker Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi, Peyman will present an abstract arrangement of objects and images reflecting on the relationship between the creative process of art and its practicalities. Peyman invites the viewer to reflect on how light and darkness coexist and interact, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding akin to ‘red intellect’, a concept of enlightened perception inspired by Suhrawardi’s work.

Shenece Oretha (Dining Room)
All afternoon
A tribute to all the moving stories, words and offerings shared during her time at Delfina Foundation, Shenece shares the progression of her forthcoming moving speakers works. Her offering for open studios celebrates the voices, people and moments that have moved her, through portrayals of voicing animated by air and an invitation to share in sound choreographing action.

Tara Al Dughaiter (Library)
All afternoon, with vocal intervention at 16:00 – 16:15
Drawing from a developing embodied practice Tara presents various processes to build sites of ritual and meditation. Notions of repair and regeneration are explored through the lens of the artist’s maternal connections to myth, dance and songs belonging to Southern Iraq’s ancient rites of spring and divination. The showcase invites visitors into these dreaming processes through reading, dancing, voicing, listening.

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Presenting Residents

Daniah Alsaleh (Saudi Arabia) explores memory and cultural conditioning, investigating how messages and beliefs are absorbed and transmitted through media and networks. Using diverse materials and computational methods, Alsaleh’s art reveals a hidden commentary on human fragility, insecurity, and vulnerability.

Han Mengyun (UK associate) is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and mother. Her work focuses on decolonizing Eurasian cultural hybridizations from the Western perspective.  Initially trained in Western oil painting, she shifted to explore complex historical connections across cultures in the continent’s past and present.

Madhushree Kamak (India) is a maverick art-science curator and information experience designer who is currently the Head of Exhibitions and Programmes at Science Gallery Bengaluru (SGB). Her practice focuses on curating and designing interdisciplinary exhibitions and public engagement programmes at the interface of science, technology, and culture.

Kvet Nguyen (Hoa Nguyen Thi) (Slovakia) focuses on untold stories of migration and otherness in the post-socialist context. An important aspect of her work is coming back to history, to the memory of the family, nation, or world history, as a source of evidence for something that has happened. Central to Kvet’s practice are the historical events that shaped her, beginning with the migration of her parents to Slovakia.

Mohammad Al Faraj‘s (Saudi Arabia) practice is inventive, spiritual, and allegorical, brought to life through his poetic language. He uses various techniques, including video, sound, photography, installation, painting, and writing, adapting his creative process to each context. Often integrating found objects into his works, he breathes new life into them. As a storyteller, he navigates the space between traditional and contemporary, fiction and nonfiction, organic and inorganic.

Pilar Elgueta (Chile) is an artist-explorer who activates ideas and images around the relation between the human being and landscape. Using the limits of representation as a resource, failure is an aesthetic phenomenon, and the journey of exploration a creative practice, visual identity and first principle of her artistic work.

Peyman Shafieezadeh (UK associate) is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, sculpture, image-based collage, and installation. At the core of his material explorations lies his attempt to reach an abstract realm where thinking becomes possible. This is achieved by combining various visual, symbolic, or linguistic elements.

Shenece Oretha (UK associate) is a multi-inter-un-disciplinary artist currently listening in London. Oretha creates collective and mobilising works activating sound in sculpture, performance, installation, workshops, print and scores.

Tara Al Dughaither (Saudi Arabia) is a voice mediator exploring improvisation, embodied composition, and inner narratives as a way of regenerating somatic and transgenerational memory, and accessing the khafi: unveiled heart. Tara describes her practice as a lifelong continuum of knowledge accumulation grounded in care, nature, mysticism, psychology, and critical feminist theory.

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These summer season residencies were made possible by our residency partners and supporters, including ARTUS Chile, The Brooks International Fellowship Programme, Tate, Saudi Visual Arts Commission, and Delfina Foundation’s regional patron networks for Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean.

* Event title taken from Han Mengyun’s three-channel video, Night Sutra (2024).