Komal Madar (b.1983) transforms discarded South Asian textiles into sculpture, performance, immersive installations and site-specific interventions. Through sustained material experimentation, she examines the cultural and social lives of materials, challenging their socio-cultural associations while drawing on ritual, memory, spiritual symbolism and embodied labour.

Madar’s practice is grounded in the philosophy of kismet (fate) and chance as both method and material. Her need to make begins with the hunt for materials. She reuses, repurposes and accumulates textiles and found objects from her environment and local ecologies, giving materials with existing histories a second life. Madar deliberately subverts the cultural expectations attached to textiles by intuitively dismantling, manipulating and transforming them through layering, slitting, tearing and burning. Their histories remain present, allowing vulnerability, destruction and repair to coexist while taking on new forms.

References to the body, labour and feminist discourse recur throughout her practice. Her recent work with wearable sculpture and found objects is activated through performance, drawing on her earlier training in Kathak (Indian classical dance), ritual and ancestral knowledge systems.  

Madar is increasingly developing interdisciplinary projects that bring together varied material investigations, participation and emerging technologies. She works collaboratively with communities through workshops and participatory projects, where making becomes a space for dialogue, cultural exchange and collective experience.

Komal is the selected artist for the program BRIDGE, a collaboration between New Art Exchange (Nottingham) and Creative Migration/Bangkok 1899 (Bangkok). BRIDGE focuses on participatory and co-creative art. The key objective of the program is to connect communities across both cities to develop socially engaged and environmentally responsive projects.