CV

Iman Raisa Datoo

INFO

Iman Datoo (b.1995) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in South Devon. 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.

Language, whether visual, spoken or intuited, serves as Iman’s primary tool to disturb and open pathways towards more-than-human worlds. She is interested in what it means to reorient ourselves around invisibilised bodies, inhabit them and readjust to their methods of rooting and re-routing. Through dialogue with scientists and academics, her work examines hierarchical relationships in natural history and plant science, considering intimacy and embodiment not only as affects, but also as modes of inquiry. As an artist trained in architecture, she often composes in hybrid and time-based media including sculpture, film, painting and drawing.

Recent works include Movement is Natural (2024), a film on the dynamics of human and nonhuman agency within Cornwall’s mining soils; 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 performance renaming the vegetal world through touch, imagination, and play.

She has exhibited across the South-West and internationally, including at Grays Wharf Gallery (2024), Soutcombe Barn (2024), The Eden Project (2022–23), KARST (2023), The Plumb, Toronto (2023), and Drugo More Gallery, Rijeka (2021). She has led workshops and performances at institutions such as Newlyn Art Gallery, the Natural History Museum, Counterpoint Arts, Cambridge University, and Tate Britain. From 2022–23, she was Artist-in-Residence at The Eden Project and the University of Exeter’s Environment & Sustainability Institute on ‘Making Kin With Soil’.

Iman is currently collaborating with Radical Ecology on a project with Natural England focused on nature recovery in post-plantation ecosystems. This work reimagines forestry through the lens of local ownership and care, probing the intersections of capitalist value systems and deep ecology to envision how we might live as co-creators with the land. More details coming soon.

CONTACT

Email:
iman(@)datoos.com

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Social Media: Instagram

USEFUL LINKS

Artist panel - Against Apartheid
Farmerama Podcast

Radical Ecology

LIST OF WORKS

2024-5

A 100-year Care Plan

Publication, Research, Public Art

2024

Movement is Natural

Project, Solo Exhibition

2024

Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature?

Performance

2024

Parallel Botany

Workshop Series

2024

Planetary Commons

Research,

2024

A Map of Southcombe Gardens

Public art

2024

Fourteen Encounters

Publication

2024

Breathwork

Film

2023

Soil-brain, Gut-brain

Installation

2023

Making Kin with Soil

Residency

2023

Soils Move, Soils Behave

Workshop Series

2023

Contaminations, Collaborations: Mapping Soil-health with potato, rhizobia, green-bean

Painting

Movement is Natural

2023

Movement is Natural

Art-research

2023

Making a Name

Installation

2024

Movement is Natural

Solo Exhibition

2024

Where do we go when we realise that we can’t go back to nature?

Performance

2024

Parallel Botany

Workshop Series

2024

Radical Ecology Digital Garden

Digital Project

2024

A Map of Southcombe Gardens

Public art

2024

Fourteen Encounters

Art-research

2024

Breathwork

Film

2023

Soil-brain, Gut-brain

Installation

2023

Making Kin with Soil

Residency

2023

Soils Move, Soils Behave

Workshop Series

2023

Contaminations, Collaborations: Mapping Soil-health with potato, rhizobia, green-bean

Painting

Movement is Natural

2023

Movement is Natural

Art-research

2023

Making a Name

Installation

2023

Kinnomic Botany

Film

Last Updated: Feb 2025

iman(@)datoos.com

Iman Datoo

Info

Kinnomic Botany:Freeing the Potato from it’s Scientific & Colonial ties,

Read more about the wider project here.

Kinnomic Botany:
Freeing the Potato from it’s Scientific & Colonial ties,