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.
Free. Booking link below.
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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
