Ndiritu Grace: Sweatshop
5 September 2019 – 8 November 2019Sweatshop
For her show at INDA Gallery, Grace Ndiritu has created a new painting and textile installation entitled SWEATSHOP. It examines the idea of the sweatshop and the objects they produce from three juxtaposing, yet, overlapping angles: i.e. The Artist Studio – artists who make objects to feed the art market; The Global South - where poorly paid workers make products for high-end fashion brands and the luxury global consumer market; and Native Indigenous Tribes whose culture and spirituality is co-opted by the self-help New Age movement. Works featured include Post-Hippie Pop Abstraction paintings and drawings (2015-2018) and Cult of The Kimono (2019), a new series of hand block printed kimonos and textile hangings from her fashion and economic research project COVERSLUT©. The 1st edition of COVERSLUT© worked with migrants, refugees and young artists during a residency at Manoeuvre in Belgium. This exhibition at INDA Gallery is part of THE YEAR OF BLACK HEALING (2020), a year-long international programme of exhibitions, performances and talks focusing on Grace Ndiritu's work, leading up to the BLACK HEALING exhibition in June 2020. It touches on topics, such as afro-futurism, activism, spiritual practice, black culture, and neo-liberalism.
Artist’s bio
Grace Ndiritu (1982) is an international visual artist. At the age of 22 she was taught at the De Ateliers, Amsterdam by film director Steven McQueen. In 2009 her art had entered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in New York, gaining a place in Phaidon's The 21st Century Art Book published in 2014. In 2014 she was also named one of the ten most important and influential artists under 40 by Apollo Magazine. Her archive of more than forty 'handmade' videos; experimental photographs, paintings, research projects and shamanic performances have been exhibited in places such as: Bluecoat, Liverpool; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Glasgow School of Art; Museum Modern of Art, Warsaw; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and the 51st Venice Biennale. Most recently her work has been featured in Whitechapel Gallery's publication: Documents of Contemporary Art: The Rural (2019) MIT Press.
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