NEW YORK, NY.- Seeded Futures, Arboreal Drifts forms part of a larger body of work focusing on colonial botany and imperial gardens. Colonial botany involved both a process of extraction and erasure – extraction of local knowledge, plants and labour, and erasure of indigenous knowledge. This also involved the transfer of specimens across the globe, a movement which went hand in hand with transfer of bodies. Scattered across three sites: London, Mumbai, and New York, Amba Sayal-Bennett traces the movement of botanical matter across different continents. For her first solo presentation in New York, rubber seeds and taxonomic drawings become protagonists followed on a botanical drift, charting stories of oppression and resistance.

In her reflections on diasporic space, Avtar Brah discusses the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. Sayal-Bennett is interested in this simultaneous condition of connection and estrangement associated with histories of migration, their intergenerational affects and transfers. A seed is a multi-temporal object, a carrier of histories and futures, however these futures are not determined nor fixed. Unlike animals, which follow a plan from conception, growing in a systematic way, plants grow anarchically. Branching or leafing out when activated, their growth is modular, adding architectural complexity through the reiteration of existing units. It is this anarchic or modular growth that underpins Sayal-Bennett’s making process, reappropriating botanical units which were central to the grammar of empire to cultivate alternate futures.

Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. She received her BFA from Oxford University and her MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. She was awarded her PhD in Art Practice and Learning from Goldsmiths and has published her practice-based research with Tate Papers. She is currently an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Between January and March 2022, she was The Derek Hill Foundation scholar at the British School at Rome in Italy.

Recent exhibitions include Proposals for a Memorial to Partition, Twelve Gates, Philadelphia (2023); Geometries of Difference, Somerset House, London (2022); Horror in the Modernist Block, IKON, Birmingham (2022); and Tomorrow, White Cube, London (2021).

DIANA New York, 127 Henry St, New York, NY 10002, United States
5 September - 26 October 2024