Komal
Madar

Komal Madar (b.1983) lives and works in London, where her multidisciplinary practice examines materials and their materiality through an anthropological lens, drawing on ritual, memory, and embodied labour. Working across sculpture, painting, performance, site-specific interventions, and installation, her practice reflects on how discarded materials can be reactivated through collective making, examining the ecological and social lives of materials.

Madar’s practice is grounded in the philosophy of kismet (fate) and chance as both method and material, in which the approach to making is a reciprocal dialogue in which material and maker shape one another. Her work often begins with the search for materials, and this search started close to home. Raised within an Indian community in the UK, she grew up surrounded by its aesthetic and material cultures, particularly textiles. Her engagement with the tactile and transformative properties of textiles allows them to embody both individual histories and larger socio-political discourses that speak to the joys and pains of being human. Her recent work with wearable sculpture and found objects is activated through movement, dance and ritual, informed by ancestral knowledge and the rhythms and rituals of her lived cultural experience.

In 2026, Madar secured representation with Runjeet Singh Gallery. She is also the recent recipient of the BRIDGE international residency programme with New Art Exchange. She will undertake a residency in Bangkok (January 2027) with Creative Migration (East) Foundation at Bangkok 1899, and a 3-week residency at NAE in Nottingham, including a final public presentation. During this time, she will further develop her socially engaged and environmentally responsive project, connecting communities in Bangkok with audiences in Nottingham, and exploring how everyday life, climate, and local ecologies shape shared and divergent experiences across both cities.

Madar’s education includes an MA in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University (2025), building on earlier training at Central Saint Martins and the University of Reading. Recent projects include an immersive installation and an augmented reality collaboration with computer programmer Julian Todd (2025), as well as curating Traces for the Liverpool Independents Biennial. Exhibitions include the New Art Exchange Group Show (2026), Talisman at Bridewell Studios & Gallery (2025), and Miniature Postage Stamp Masterpiece at Nippon Gallery (touring India, 2024–2025). In 2023, her work was featured in Vogue India, which highlighted her Yoni textile sculptures in a contemporary art context.