Bryony Dunne, Seeds from the Zoo, 2016, Sculptural installation
Seeds from the Zoo is an imaginative visual response to Cairo’s Giza Zoo vis-à-vis the legacy of European colonialism. Established under British occupation in 1891, the Giza Zoo houses a range of trees native to India, Brazil, Burma, Australia, Madagascar, and the Malay Peninsula that were imported to Egypt via the Suez Canal.
Over the course of Dunne’s two-year multidisciplinary project on the zoo’s flora and fauna — or the “living archive” of colonialism — the artist collected fallen seeds from the site. She reinterpreted each seed by hand-painting hyperreal animal skins on their pods. In doing so, she aimed to highlight the zoo’s imitative nature and sinister superficiality.