indigo+madder Kirkman House, 12 – 14 Whitfield Street, London W1T 2RF
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Krittika Sharma co-founded indigo+madder in Deptford in 2019, then moved to a more central location last year – add Alice Black, Castor and Rosenfeld, by the way, and you have a handy circuit on the eastern side of Fitzrovia.
indigo+madder’s primary focus is contemporary art from the Global South and its diaspora – it was, for example, where I first saw the work of Anousha Payne, Amba Sayal-Bennett and Haroun Hayward – but with the broader aims of championing the work of underrepresented groups in general and ‘collaborating with both local and international artists to initiate impactful cross-cultural discourse.’ Krittika has been adventurous in commissioning writing to enrich her exhibitions, and for the current and notably diverse three-person show ‘Afterlife’ (to 30 Sept) one of the participants – London-based artist and writer Jordan/Martin Hell – interviews and writes insightfully about the other two – New York painter Anjuli Rathod and Canary Islands architect-artist Estefanía B Flores. Krittika appears above with the latter’s ‘Destroy this card’, an impressive installation incorporating molten and somewhat lung-like pigeon wings on roller skates, nipples with eyelashes and the sculptural use of LED screens.
Flores tells Hell it ‘relates to video games and the aesthetics of contemporary entertainment mixed with what I encounter in everyday life, what filters through me through algorithms, signs, the various technologies we interact with’, including ‘elements that I take from anime or manga or games culture… and then recontextualize into these sort of mixed fabrications’.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
