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TANK.TV | My Dinner with Sumayya

In a moment when we are asked to be fast, reactive, and always legible – this series offers an insistence on slowness, born from a desire not to be packagable or correct.

The series began, loosely, as a reflection on the film My Dinner with Andre and its portrayal of the unhurried unfolding of thoughts across a shared meal. These are not interviews. There are no scripts. Just a table, a guest, and a conversation that moves, sometimes sideways, sometimes deep.

As an architect, Sumayya Vally's work is often about shaping space. But here, she is thinking about how space is shaped by presence; by listening, by trust, by intimacy. Some of the guests are longtime friends, others are people whose work she has long admired from afar. These episodes are offered as invitations to imagine worlds from these overheard fragments.

Produced by the incredible TANK.TV team.

In the series premiere, Sumayya Vally sat down with friend and sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan to discuss his genre-defying politics of listening, the influences that shaped his practice, and the monumental work he is doing with the NGO he founded, Earshot.

In the second episode of My Dinner with Sumayya, she hosted Pakistani-American singer and dear friend, Ali Sethi. The pair discussed his latest album’s hybrid, exuberant sensibility, the experiential nature of art, resistance to categorisation, and the importance of infinity.

For the third episode of My Dinner with Sumayya with TANK, Sumayya Vally chats to her dear friend, the acclaimed artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Lynette is best-known for her ethereal portraits of characters. In this episode the friends discuss freedom and connected struggles; creative logics and artistic languages; and the sheer will to persist.

In the fourth episode of My Dinner with Sumayya, she is in conversation with the Pakistani writer, Fatima Bhutto, about writing, about belonging, and about the discipline of holding silence until you have something true to say.