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Seedlings: Diasporic Imaginaries

Continuing Travelling Gallery’s 2025 programme is a group exhibition exploring ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives.

Challenging the boundaries between culture and nature, the exhibition looks to destabilise colonial systems, categories, and hierarchies, that tend to favour scientific theory and marginalise ancestral knowledges and indigenous cosmologies.

Curated with Jelena Sofronijevic, and featuring work by artists Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Remi Jabłecki, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Leo Robinson and Amba Sayal-Bennett, the exhibition brings together a variety of contemporary artistic practices, including drawing, printmaking, sculpture and film, that reimagine our collective understandings and visions of places and times.

Common across the works in the exhibition is the use of the seed as a means to think about and connect themes concerning ecologies, environments, and migration. For some, the seed represents a world of its own, a self-contained body or cell, capable of crossing borders.

For others, it serves as a starting point for alternative possibilities and ways of being. Many of the artists have researched specific seeds, in their ‘native’ soils, and displaced in banks and libraries.

The potato is offered as an incidental ‘root’ to many of their works. In the film, Kinnomic Botany (2022), Iman Datoo draws upon research in the Commonwealth Potato Collection at the James Hutton Institute near Dundee, the UK’s largest collection of potato seeds, to challenge dominant taxonomies or ways of classifying lives.

More speculative connections can be made between Remi Jabłecki and Radovan Kraguly’s practices. The former’s futuristic sculptures remind us of the otherworldly, even alien qualities of these most earthly and everyday British crops, with the artist using them as a means to think about transformation and personal growth.

Kraguly’s prints,though as detailed as scientific and botanical illustrations, are similarly cosmic, avoiding categorisation in their ambiguous representations and titles.

Reflecting on relations of control between humans and nature, his works also illustrate the role of different pastoral and agricultural environments in the formation of the artist’s own identity and early adoption of ‘climate politics’, connecting his formative experiences growing up on a farm in the former Yugoslavia, to his later practice in rural Wales.

Amba Sayal-Bennett’s architectural sculptures Kern (2024) and Phlo (2024) are part of the artist’s investigations into rubber, a commodity once so highly demanded its value surpassed that of silver. In a mission facilitated by the British government, Henry Wickham stole and trafficked 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 1876.

Transported to Kew Gardens in London, they were then dispersed to British colonies for cultivation. Its plural uses and potential for profit led to its proliferation across the globe – yet the soil in India refused to take the seeds, which the artist puts forward as a form of environmental resistance to the colonial project.

Artist Emii Alrai, by contrast, focusses on excavation, exploring archaeology, Western museological structures, and the complex process of ruination.

Scotland has proved fertile land for many of the artists’ practices, yet, for some, SEEDLINGS presents the first opportunity to experience their works in these contexts.

Born in Subotica, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Zeljko Kujundzic lived and worked in Edinburgh between 1948 and 1958, before moving with his partner and frequent collaborator, Ann, and their children, to British Columbia (BC).

His developed, complex work in ceramic sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird, a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in North American indigenous and First Nation cultures and storytelling, is deeply rooted in these early experiences.

Yet his part in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community, and work with artists and writers like Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nannie Katharin Wells, Bernard Leach, and Joan Faithfull, has, thus far, been walked over, in more conventional art histories.

A selection of archive materials concerning his invention of the solar kiln, unearthed from public and private collections across the UK and Canada, are presented here for the first time – the exhibition itself seeking to germinate future research.

The exhibition will also include a newly commissioned essay, How does a tree fit inside a seed?, exploring the artists’ works, both individually, and as constellated in the exhibition, by the curator Jelena Sofronijevic.

The text journeys through the construction and overlapping uses of terms like ‘native’ and, ‘invasive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘naturalisation’, and ‘dispersal’, to challenge binaries between beings, and consider ideas of home, identity, and belonging in the context of diasporas.

Launched in Edinburgh on Calton Hill (outside the Collective Gallery) on Friday 6 June. the exhibition will tour to arts venues, community centres, high streets and schools across Scotland including in the Western Isles, Glasgow, Falkirk, Clackmannanshire, North Lanarkshire, Scottish Borders before culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival in August.

It is accompanied by a series of interventions on social media, highlighting the artists’ connections to the places of our tour, and a number of talks, tours, and workshops, including with artist Leo Robinson.

Details of confirmed tour dates and venues can be found on the Travelling Gallery website. 

Louise Briggs, Curator, Travelling Gallery said: “It has been a real pleasure to work with Jelena Sofronijevic on this exhibition and to be introduced to the work of a number of artists, many of whom have interesting connections to Edinburgh and Scotland through their work & research as well as their personal & professional lives.

“This exhibition continues to explore our annual theme looking at The Environment and Climate Emergency.

“We hope SEEDLINGS will offer visitors a new way of thinking about our relationship with, and connection to nature and may encourage them to perhaps think about our worlds and our interconnectedness in different ways.”

Culture and Communities Convener Margaret Graham, said: “The Travelling Gallery is a unique and fantastic example of how art can and should be accessible for all. I’m delighted that, with our support, the Gallery has been able to remove barriers to art by taking powerful and thought-provoking exhibitions into communities across Scotland.

“This year’s exhibition not only invites us to engage with outstanding contemporary works but also encourages us to reflect on the world through different lenses.

“With such a talented group of artists involved, I encourage everyone to visit when the gallery sets off this week.”

Additional thanks go to: All of the exhibiting artists; Nena Kraguly; Family and Friends of Kujundzic; The City of Edinburgh Council; Creative Scotland; City Art Centre, Edinburgh; Government Art Collection; Ingleby Gallery; Carbon 12 Gallery; Palmer Gallery; and the University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.