Friday 16 May
14°C and Few Clouds
Another milestone: Agnes is closed to the public as we prepare for Agnes Reimagined. Stay tuned for plans for off-site programming!
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Co-presented with Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA)
Opening Reception: 6 June, 5:30 pm
How can artwork embedded in one ecosystem find kinship in a new ecosystem? In UK-based artist Iman Datoo’s solo exhibition combining digital claymation, sound installation and augmented reality, an intriguing narrative takes root between the potato and its local cousins. The Queen’s University Biological Station (QUBS) main field site, where Iman Datoo is Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence, is located on Opinicon Lake, which possibly takes its name from the Ojibwe word for potato. “Opin” likely refers to the shallow water tubers variously known as duck potato, katniss, wapato, or arrowhead. Datoo invents “kinnomics,” naming a broad set of trans-disciplinary approaches to moving between ecologies while listening and learning different value systems. “Kinnomics” signals a shift from matters of economics (management of the house, oikonomikos) to methods of making kin.
Iman Datoo (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Devon, UK. Her practice brings together botany and cartography within the spatial environments of stories to consider forces of agency, liveness and animacy between plants, soils and people. At the heart of her practice is a desire to build relationality with our non-human counterparts and explore how forms of human agency can be mobilised through modes of listening, noticing and sensory inquiry. Iman’s projects encompass installation, film, participatory performance and sculpture, with each medium carefully selected to reflect the ideas and interactions at play. Her works challenge the binaries between natural and artificial, inanimate and lively, wild and cultivated, serving as grounds for reimagining ecosystem recovery through imagination and speculation.
Rooted in South-West England’s unique ecological and cultural landscape, Iman’s practice addresses local concerns of environmental justice, land politics and plant migration. She is currently working with climate justice organisation Radical Ecology to develop a 100-year care plan for a post-plantation woodland in Devon. Her long-term focus is on soil recovery in Cornwall’s post-industrial mining landscapes through an intersection of eco-somatic art practice with feminist science studies and decolonial ecology. This work builds on a long-term project stemming from her residency with the Eden Project and University of Exeter, titled Making Kin with Soil.
Recent works include Movement is Natural (2024), a film uncovering the knowledge held in the disturbances of so-called ‘waste’ soils in Cornwall’s mining tips and pits; Soil-Brain, Gut-Brain (2023), an audio-tactile installation exploring soil erosion through the lens of eating, digestion and nourishment; Kinnomic Botany (2020–22), a film tracing the migratory epistemologies of the potato; and Making a Name (2022), a participatory installation renaming the vegetal world through touch, conversation and play.
Instagram: @imandatoo
www.imandatoo.com
Funding is generously provided by FOLDA, the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts, Queen’s University Brockington Visitorship, Canada Council for the Arts, and Queen’s University Biological Station.
