Three months in London flew by faster than I imagined. It was a time full of encounters that opened the world up for me in unexpected ways – not only with people, but also with institutions, archives, and neighbourhoods. It marked the beginning of conversations that I hope will continue to unfold in different forms over time.

My initial plan for the residency was to research the Stranger’s Home, a lodging house for seafarers from Asia and Africa in London (1858–1940). As the research unfolded, I became increasingly drawn into the interconnected histories of Sylhet and London. At the same time, I wanted to remain open to unforeseen directions, allowing the residency to be shaped by what emerged through the process.

The Delfina Foundation residency generously provides a framework without fixed outcomes or obligations. For me, this created the conditions to follow questions as they developed, moving between archival research, conversations, walking, and making. Much of my time became focused on the histories of Sylhetis in London, formal and informal lodging houses, and especially Ayub Ali Dining, later known as Shah Jalal Café.

Somewhere in London’s East End, in the middle of the twentieth century London, migrant seafarers stepped off ships carrying little more than addresses scribbled onto scraps of paper. One of those addresses led to Ayub Ali Dining, on 76 Commercial street – that became a pivotal space among Asian seafarers (lascars) and newly arrived migrants in postwar Britain.

The café was founded by Ayub Ali Master, a Sylheti migrant who had travelled widely while working as a seafarer, spending time in Sylhet, Kolkata, Singapore, Detroit, and London. Later, in London, he began working as an intermediary between shipping companies, British authorities, and Indian seafarers. Familiar with the labyrinth of maritime bureaucracy, he helped lascars negotiate wages, papers, lodging, and survival itself. At a time when many Asian seafarers were abandoned in British ports, denied rights, or left stranded, Ayub Ali became a crucial figure of orientation. The café emerged from this knowledge. It was not simply a restaurant, but an unofficial advice centre, refuge, employment exchange, post office, legal aid desk, and social world.

Its later name, Shah Jalal Café, carries another migration story. Shah Jalal – the revered Sufi saint believed to have travelled from the region around present-day Turkey or Lebanon before settling in Sylhet in the fourteenth century – remains a powerful figure within Sylheti cultural memory. The renaming folds older histories of movement, making space, and spiritual passage into the geography of twentieth-century London. Migration here is not singular or recent; it unfolds across centuries, oceans, and empires.

Alongside the café stood Ayub Ali Master’s home in Tower Hamlets, known simply as “Number 13.” Like the café, the house became a place where seafarers sought assistance, temporary shelter, and information. I became drawn to these interiors – cafés, kitchens, boarding rooms, corridors – and how they quietly carried worlds within them. 

This research also led me to experiment with ways of engaging archival material and its absences – creating images that do not quite exist within the archive, but borrow from other photographs and ephemera found from the same time, and also the visual language of record-keeping and documentation at that time – to create imaginary carbon copies.

Over time, stories about stones began to surface through the research. The histories connecting Sylhet and London seemed to be marked by them. There is the handful of soil said to have accompanied the Sufi saint Shah Jalal on his journey from the region around present-day Turkey or Lebanon to Sylhet. According to the story, he was instructed to settle where the soil he carried matched the ground beneath his feet. There are also the stones thrown through the windows of squatted houses in Spitalfields during the 1970s, when many Sylheti families faced racist violence and harassment.

The open studio provided a space to try out ideas. The installation brought together moving and still images, imagined carbon-blue archival impressions of Ayub Ali Dining, and a game taught to me by Amina from the Siddi community in Baichvad, Karnataka.

Elements of the Delfina Foundation house also entered the installation: tea cups stacked into a column, a short video of Romain changing the lock on my room door, and a recording of the sounds outside (wind, rain, and the neighbourhood) travelling through and being distorted by the fireplace shaft in my room. The sound piece was paired with a fragment of bone collected from the Thames shore, which had a small square hole.

Residencies, too, are stranger’s houses – spaces of unfamiliarity, transit, and shared time. My experience was deeply enriched by the other residents, as well as by the people who work at and sustain the foundation.

 (Open studio photos credit - Anne Tetzlaff)