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Iman Datoo was the 2025 Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence and Queen’s University Brockington Visiting Scholar, collaborating with the Queen’s University Biological Station (QUBS). Her residency also included a key partnership with Kingston’s FOLDA (Festival of Live Digital Art). The Queen’s Fine Art (Visual Art) Program provided the studio space. Iman Datoo spent most of May 2025 living and working at the QUBS field station located on Opinicon Lake about one hour north of Kingston. She returned to Kingston in November to give public talks and participate in a playgroup micro-residency with eight local artists.
This residency supported Iman Datoo’s artistic research into the world-making abilities of plants, soils and people, and it enabled multiple opportunities for learning exchange. Cross-disciplinary dialogues grew mainly from the research residency at QUBS and the Agnes exhibition Kinnomics, which featured Datoo’s recent work in video, drawing, digital claymation, sound installation, and a set of newly commissioned clay artworks.
While at QUBS, Iman Datoo studied natural kinships that span geographies, species and ecologies. Indeed, a local potato species provided an intriguing starting point, given Datoo’s previous work on the migration of the potato through different value systems. Opinicon Lake 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.
As part of her investigations, Datoo met with past QUBS Herbarium curator Christopher Eckert to discuss the duck potato archives. She spent her time talking with biology researchers and walking trails, investigating narratives of abundance and the generative/porous edges of species boundaries. She engaged with QUBS as a novel ecosystem in the Frontenac axis, where migratory bodies—both human and non-human—converge across geologies of granite, limestone and gneiss. As an artist drawing from training in architecture, deep study of ecology and traditional Indian art forms, Datoo crafts interventions that bridge reason and imagination, science and art. During the residency, she drew from practices of deep-listening and began speculating on theories of quantum time to invite new modes of sensing, observing, and relating to the landscape.
As a complement to her time at QUBS and as part of a regular scholarly and community exchange series, Datoo gave a talk called “Abundant Futurities: Mapping Intra-actions at Queens University Biological Field Station.” In it, she shared four speculative species with the assembled students, researchers, faculty, local artists, and Rideau Lakes residents. These species emerged from her research in the QUBS herbarium and inform a “non-origin” story of the local ecology; they soon appeared as clay sculptures in her Kinnomics exhibition.
In addition to the researchers, educators and students in the natural sciences, the residency facilitated ongoing conversations between Iman Datoo and those in Black Studies, Gender Studies, and Visual Art. It generated remarkable cross-disciplinary student and faculty engagement, evidenced by a high level of curiosity and initiative across a wide range of departments. Iman became productively entangled with the Department of Film and Media (through the graduate program in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies); the Dan School of Drama and Music, via FOLDA; Gender Studies and Black Studies, where she presented to their seminar; and Fine Arts (Visual Arts), which invited her to give a visiting artist lecture. Finally, Iman Datoo engaged with a multi-disciplinary group of local artists in the H.E.A.P. Micro-Residency.
The exhibition Kinnomics: Iman Datoo was an opportunity to introduce Iman Datoo’s work to Agnes members, Queen’s students and community partners through a close examination of a body of work that explored Datoo’s approach to multi-species narratives of repair. It was also a learning opportunity for curatorial students to think through the “ecologies” of art residencies. The exhibition was curated by a group of graduate students: Paula Antonakos-Boswell, Maeva Baldassarra, Baiqing Audrey Chen, Sasza Hinton, Seymour Irons, Sana Kazemirashid, Nicola Koroknay, Murphy Liu, Andrea Malus, Andy O’Neil, Sam Sunwoo, Andrei Pora, and Haofan Wang, with coordinating curator Sunny Kerr, through Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies 830.
Iman Datoo was a part of FOLDA’s The StartUp livestreamed discussion event held at the Isabel Bader Centre for Performing Arts that focused on the “International Context,” and asked, “how can Canada play a bigger role in international culture? How are we perceived from abroad? What relationships and types of work could prove fruitful?”
Image credit: Sunny Kerr
Datoo speaking at Queen’s University Biological Station, 2025. Photo: Liz Cooper
Iman Datoo is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher based in South Devon, UK. Her practice investigates the world-making capacities of plants, soils and people: how we move, behave and make place. Working through video, clay-work, scoring, installation and performance, she crafts situated projects that become worlds in themselves: narrative spaces where people can gather, journey, and make with the land through their bodies. At the centre of Iman’s work is “kinnomics,” a transitional framework that shifts thinking away from an economics of commodification toward making kin with overlooked careworkers and labourers, foregrounding an intimate planetary existence in which the human is never at the centre but constantly embroiled in relation. She understands the imaginary not as a place of escape, but as a liminal zone, where alternative values and ways of being can be improvised and practiced through stories of repair.
Iman is part of the Two Together Residency with Porthmeor Studios and the Freelands Foundation. She serves as Head of Research and Community at Radical Ecology and is a LAHP-funded, practice-led PhD candidate between UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her debut solo exhibition Kinnomics opened at the Agnes Etherington Arts Centre in 2025. Recent exhibitions include Gray’s Wharf Gallery (Cornwall, 2024), Travelling Gallery (Edinburgh Arts Festival, 2025), Southcombe Barn (Dartmoor, 2025, 2024), KARST (Plymouth, 2023), The Eden Project (St Austell, 2022–23) and The Plumb (Toronto, 2023). She has led workshops and performances at institutions such as Newlyn Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, Counterpoint Arts, Cambridge University, and Tate Britain.
Opening reception for Kinnomics. Image: Garrett Elliott.
Iman Datoo in her studio in Kingston, Ontario. Photo credit: Liz Cooper
