Amba Sayal-Bennett

Amba Sayal-Bennett is a British-Indian artist working across drawing, projection, and sculptural installation. Her practice explores how methods of abstraction are exclusionary and performative, crafting boundaries between what is present, manifestly absent, and othered. Her recent work focuses on the migration of modernist forms and their role within fascist and brutalist architecture. Using translation as method, she explores the movement of bodies, knowledge and form across different sites, processes inherent to the diasporic experience.

This question of where the past exists and how it is traced is explored in Amba Sayal-Bennett’s wall-mounted sculptural pieces. They form part of her larger body of work, which looks at colonial botany and processes of extraction. One component of this is the story of Sayal-Bennett’s late grandmother who was displaced from the northern Indian state of Punjab to the UK during the Partition of India following independence from British rule. 

Displacement, its inherited memories and traumas are reflected in the practices of colonial botany, where plant species and seeds are extracted from their indigenous context and relocated to new environments, where they survive in new and adapted forms or die. Sayal-Bennett tells the story of 70,000 rubber seeds stolen by the British government from Brazil, brought back to Kew Gardens, then sent on to the colonies for cultivation. The Indian climate and soil refused to take the seeds, which Sayal-Bennett describes as an insurgent infrastructure, refusing to comply with the colonial project."

Excerpt from Between Hands and Metal an essay by Shahed Saleem