Earlier this year, Helsinki-based artist, curator, researcher, and writer Ali Akbar Mehta was selected from over 600 applicants for Delfina Foundation’s Science, Technology, Society themed residency programme, supported by the Institute. His current practice explores how social media and smart technologies are vulnerable to surveillance and data extraction.
Delfina Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to artistic exchange. Through residencies, public programmes, and international collaborations, it supports research and creative production both in the UK and internationally. The Foundation is located just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.
We spoke with Ali about his residency experience, how his practice evolved during his time at Delfina, and the differences between the art scenes in London and Helsinki.
Can you tell us more about your practice and the focus of your current research?
Since 2023, I’ve been working on Borderland(er)s, a constellation of artworks that narrate intimate and global histories of violence. These artworks initiate a creative response to our understanding of “borderization” – a process that causes reinforcement, reproduction and intensification of vulnerability. In these artworks, I foreground overlooked bodies, data, networks, and ecologies.
The first work in the series, titled purgatory EDIT: Liberation Archives for the Cyborgs of Now, is a user-generated montage-based cinematic experience. It was recently exhibited at transmediale studio in partnership with silent green and the European Media Art Platform (EMAP). It invites its audience as participants to investigate a media archive using their own emotional, neural, and cognitive agency via a portable EEG ‘brainware’, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), and through proprietary software developed by the purgatory EDIT team. Through this technomediated cyber-performance, it examines narratives drawn from zones of conflict and dominant power structures – asking, how can artistic imagination affect politics of power, violence and justice?
You’re currently at an 11-week residency at Delfina Foundation during their thematic season of ‘Science, Technology, and Society.’ What inspired you to apply for this residency?
This thematic residency at Delfina is focused on Emerging Technologies and Mental Health. Here, I am developing a new work, the second in the Borderlander(s) series, titled Precarious MOB. It is a technomediated performance series that uses a custom-built app to conduct a real-time translation of live data into a choreography of instructions. This generative instruction-based referential social choreography transforms the audience into performers to highlight the normalised socio-politics of our tenuous relationship with online data and digital technologies.
Inspired by Samuel Beckett‘s The Lost Ones (1970), where in Beckett’s cylinder, lost beings search endlessly within a confined space; here the audience as performers, framed as the ‘MOB’ — Machine Oriented Bipeds — exist in perpetual economic and ontological instability, their humanity commodified and subordinated to machine logic, surveillance capitalism, digital extractivism and the attention economies of neoliberal capitalism.
In The Precarious MOB, Beckett’s existential absurdity — the meaningless routines, the arbitrary divisions, the futile searching — merge with neo-cyberpunk tropes of alienation, technologically enhanced cultural systems, anarchist resistance, and structural reconfigurations of social relations. By creating physical manifestations of how data flows affect human behavior and societal structures, the performance becomes a living embodiment of how algorithmic systems and data extractivism shape modern existence — creating a powerful critique of digital control systems and systemic oppression that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary.
This residency facilitates my ongoing practice of experimenting with new archival logics and developing research-driven archival projects that create counter-violence strategies and ways of trauma-healing.
What makes London a particularly interesting place to explore issues of surveillance and the vulnerabilities of social media?
Statistically speaking, London is one of the most surveilled cities in the world. It contains the highest density of CCTV networks in Europe, with 942 000 cameras monitoring 81 million people per year. You are likely to be captured on London CCTV up to 70 times per day.
What does a typical day in the residency look like for you?
A typical day involves research-based work, often on my laptop or in the common working area, cooking – either individually or collectively – in the common kitchen and interacting with the other residents, and attending the multiple art events being held daily in the city.
The residency has been quite fast-paced and dynamic in multiple ways. The folks at Delfina work hard to create bespoke programs of creating networks and connections for each of the artists. Delfina also holds its bimonthly ‘family lunch/dinners’ and hosts other events at the residency house as ways to facilitate more intimate exchanges with the foundation’s vast network of patrons and friends.
Overall, the residency has been a great way to be introduced to London for the first time, and witness its vibrant art scene. Now, suddenly, 3 months seem too short a time to spend here.
Has being in London, or the residency environment at Delfina, sparked any new ideas or directions in your work, or influenced it in any way so far?
Yes, definitely. Spending time at Delfina Residency has meant experiencing London and the UK as a spectrum of cultural spaces that continuously challenge you with new ideas, works, and practices – presented through exhibitions, talks, and the range of cultural work, often behind the scenes, that is produced here.
Delfina Foundation is a unique opportunity to engage with the London art scene in a very different way that is somehow intimate. I had opportunities to meet and engage with artists, curators, gallerists, museum workers, as well as collectors and various patrons of the arts. These initial meetings and conversations have certainly impacted ways in which I think about my practice, providing practical and conceptual insights in ways to research, develop and create future work, exhibition and curatorial methodologies, and outreach strategies.
I am also happy to have been part of a thematic residency. It has meant that the eight international and four London-based artists are connected by the thread of a conceptual narrative in their practice. It has led to hours of discussions with each artist, discussing work, swapping methodologies, conspiring and dreaming up new collaborations, and exchanging advice. Engaging with the co-residents and the folks at Delfina has been the most enriching part of the residency.
The residency emphasises research rather than production. Are there any outcomes/insights you hope to gain during your time in London?
The residency has provided me with time and space to think outside the constraints of a production environment. Here, I have been able to research, study, and further develop The Praecarious MOB, expanding its scope from a basic idea into a multi-part project – including a live action role play (LARP) based technomediated performance, using various emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environments; an animated film and video game elements.
My time in London has enabled me to develop various collaborations with game developers, experts in working with Machine Learning and AI technologies, neuroscientists and digital media theorists, with whom I hope to carry out this and future projects.
What are your first impressions of London’s art and cultural scene? In your experience, how does it differ from the Finnish art scene from an artist’s perspective?
There are multiple aspects in which the art scenes of London and Helsinki differ. The first is that, since historically Finland has been a socialist welfare state with a strong union culture that exists to date, artists have worked through generations of state and private grants, and have created a very different kind of art scene – one that supports artistic practice outside of commercial and art market conditions. Artists and collective-driven grassroot organisations form the bulk of the Finnish art scene, and Finland has the highest population-to-museum ratio in the EU. On the other hand, there are relatively few non-Finnish art and cultural workers who survive in the Finnish art scene, visible largely in institutional spaces of Finland such as universities, museums, or policy level administration spaces, where one can see the utter absence of non-white Finnish bodies in any positions of meaningful leadership roles.
London, and possibly UK-based artists, have negligible structural and ongoing state support, but it is nevertheless the hub of a thriving international art market with a global outreach. One sees a thriving, globally diverse, and rich tapestry of artistic practice converging in London. In my first month itself, I saw exhibitions of Theaster Gates, Mike Kelley, Donald Rodney, and Lauren Halsey –artists, practices, and exhibitions I would not have seen in Helsinki.
These dichotomies – of state-supported and market-driven economies, and monoculturality and diversity – are the largest differences I can think of.
What’s next for you after residency?
After my residency, I go back to Helsinki, where I’ve been away from home since mid-October.
I will work to develop exhibitions of my project, purgatory EDIT, which has only recently been completed in January of 2025. Based on the success of its debut showing at the transmediale festival 2025, I hope to exhibit the project in its intended scale and scope, possibly in Finland and in the UK.
A step towards this is an invitation to present the work at an iteration of Late at Tate Britain, co-curated in collaboration with HERVISIONS. The evening, is focused arond the thematic framework of Digital Intimacies, and I’m excited to bring to it a project that casts audience members as active participants, who undergo an immersive voyage through historical events and speculative futures, where they challenge underlying power relations and violence embedded in media representation, how they are reproduced over time and how they structurally (re)shape the stories we tell.
On a more long-term basis, I am developing a proposal for a reader-style publication, partly in collaboration with some of the Delfina residents, which will encompass key themes that purgatory EDIT as a project is engaging with.
Ali Akbar Mehta at Late at Tate Britain on Friday 16 May at 6–9.45pm, free entry. More info on Tate’s website here.
Photo: Brend Brundert
