On Our Shared Table. 
Botanical Histories, Colonial Pollination, and Material Traces

 

During his residency at SAVVY within the programme REFLEKT 2025, Malaysian artist Zelin Seah has continued his inquiry into how land, labor, and botanical histories are entangled through colonial trade, migration, and ecological memory. For his final presentation, you are invited to break bread together over dinner and an installation titled "On Our Shared Table", turning a shared meal into a terrain of history, materiality, and a way of thinking together.

The centerpiece of this share table is laid with bread topped with plants from both the global south and north: an imagined garden. This garden tablescape quietly echoes the Berlin Conference of 1884 – where territories were divided across a table – and the establishment of the Berlin Botanical Garden in 1897, where Europe experimented with tropical plants in greenhouse conditions, marking early forms of colonial pollination and control. The bread rests on a tablecloth made of washi paper and oil palm empty fruit bunch fibre, a delicate surface that absorbs oil, dirt, and the touch of hands, and acts as a fragile archive of encounter. Around it, installations interlace with living plants, creating a dialogue between Malaysia’s palm oil terrains, Africa as botanical origin, and Europe as classifier, extractor, and early pollinator of seeds, species, and ideas. Here, fibers, foliage, and histories intermingle in subtle contamination. Through this gathering, materials bear witness to ecological and colonial histories, the table becomes a site of inquiry, and the meal itself becomes a map of intertwined human and nonhuman traces; inviting questions both intimate and structural: who gets to travel, to pollinate, to take root, and who is made to remain still?

"On Our Shared Table" is both intimate and geopolitical – a quiet offering and a careful reckoning –  inviting participants to reflect on the intersections of memory, materiality, and ecological knowledge central to Zelin’s ongoing practice to mark the conclusion of his residency.

Zelin Seah is a Malaysian visual artist and lecturer in Fine Arts whose practice moves through the entanglements of land, memory, and material trace. Rooted in long-term research, his work investigates how extractive economies and postcolonial regimes leave their mark—on bodies, maps, and landscapes. He works across installation, fiber art, and cartographic interventions, often using natural materials like rattan or oil palm waste to unearth the silent histories they carry. From altered land titles to forgotten grasses, his recent projects examine how nature is framed through systems of value, and how ecological residue holds the ghosts of erased knowledge. He has undertaken residencies at basis Frankfurt e.V. and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, and in 2025 presented a solo exhibition, This Land is ( ) Land, at Richard Koh Fine Art in Singapore. His work is held in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum and the National Art Gallery Malaysia.