Latest collaboration: Romi was shortlisted for the 2024 Emergent bursary with BALTIC and Shape Arts.

Artist statement: Romi Sarfaty is a contemporary performance and visual artist. Her work is inspired by worlds of mythology and make-belief, associative streams of consciousness, iconography, and a raw, unashamed state of mind. In Romi's practice, she works with abstraction, absurdity, and melodrama. She is drawn to present, embody, and celebrate things in their most extreme, grotesque form. Romi's research delves into neurodivergent thinking, playing with and re-arranging what exists in reality with an attention to what it triggers in the mind.

Inspire by psycho-magic and sustainable practices, Romi crafts her own costumes and sets, considering the visual the most crucial way of communicating. Her movement and writing practice are driven by body-mind frequencies and urges, inspired by Butoh, body-weather, and body-archive philosophies. Romi considers craft-making and use of bodies as forms of visual communication, aspiring to generate content that is authentic and led by the state of the self and its surroundings.

Romi's writings and illustrations incorporate and take prompts from 'accidents' of dyslexia. She strives to work with acknowledgement for What There Is, resisting the temptation to focus on absence.

Check out Romi's website Follow Romi on Instagram

Image courtesy of the artist. Description: Photograph of an outdoor installation or performance. Centre frame, in a luscious green environment, is wide shrub or bush with bright green leaves. Wrapping around its base from right to left are three human bodies clad in bright purple morph suits, lying at various angles. They lay atop a bed of more purple material - possibly artificial leaves, though their specific form is ambiguous.

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Banner image: Image credit: Jessy Earl. Description: Photograph of a performance. On a dark platform or stage, lit centrally by a magenta-hued light, are two performers in costumes resembling very exaggerated dolls, with large round breasts and triangle bikinis. Their faces - which are masks - have huge eyes and tongues that stick out and down incredibly long. They are kneeling side by side on top of a black and white spiral motif laid on the platform. They are both holding their larger-than-life heads between their hands, as though grabbing at their hair by their ears - mimicking the gesture which is commonly understood to signal 'crazy'. Behind them, in the shadows, is more of the set - we can just make out large cartoon-like eyes adorning stars and other jagged shapes.