Since the early 1990s, Malaysian-born Singaporean artist Kumari Nahappan's interdisciplinary practice has spanned painting, sculpture, and installation. Across more than three decades, her work has consistently engaged with natural forms and materials seeds, grains, spices, fruits as sites through which questions of potential, continuity, and cultural memory take root. Characterised by a sustained attentiveness to material transformation and symbolic charge, her practice situates individual works within broader systems of belief, exchange, and lived experience.

At the centre of Roots & Routes is the seed: a form modest in scale yet immense in implication. Seeds contain within them the capacity to grow into organisms many times their original size, embodying a temporal leap between present state and future possibility. In Nahappan's practice, this latent potential has long been a recurring concern. Her repeated use of seeds foregrounds not only growth and fertility, but patience, accumulation, and trust in processes that unfold gradually. The seed, here, is understood as something that must first take root-absorbing its surroundings before transformation becomes visible.

This exhibition situates these concerns within longer histories of movement that have shaped the region, particularly those associated with the spice trade. Long before the emergence of modern borders, seeds and spices travelled vast distances across oceans and ports, carried alongside people, beliefs, and knowledge systems. Upon arrival, they were planted physically and culturally— adapting to new soils and climates. These routes of circulation enabled ideas and practices to take root elsewhere, altering both origin and destination in the process.

Colour remains a defining force within Nahappan's practice and assumes renewed significance in this body of work. Her employment of colour often saturated and symbolically charged operates as a connective register through which forms are grounded and enlivened. In bringing together this new assortment of works, Roots & Routes offers fresh insight into a practice shaped by the continual act of rooting and re-rooting, revealing how Nahappan's works remain embedded within history while remaining responsive to the world they inhabit.