Niru Ratnam

About the Gallery
Niru Ratnam opened in 2020, exhibiting a diverse roster of artists from across geographies and generations, often focusing on artists from previously underrepresented backgrounds. We work with a mixture of established and early-career artists and are committed to showing wide range of media that includes film, installation and performance as well as painting and sculpture. Several of the artists we represent work across a range of media and we aim to show the breath of their practice when we exhibit them.

The gallery's program builds on Ratnam's earlier career as a writer and academic whose work focused on issues such as postcolonialism and globalisation in relation to modern and contemporary art. Ratnam has a Sri Lankan Tamil heritage and his work in the art world has been committed to the politics of representation, as well as an ability to situate contemporary practices within broader cultural and social contexts.

About the Presentation
Niru Ratnam will present work by Rita Keegan in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. Rita Keegan OBE (b. 1949, Bronx, New York) is a pioneering artist whose work in painting, portraiture, collage, and archival practice has shaped contemporary understandings of identity, memory, and representation. After moving to London in 1980, she became a key figure in the British Black Arts Movement, co-founding the Brixton Art Gallery and helping establish the Women Artists of Colour Index (WOCI) to support marginalized artists. Her portraits, often centered on Black women, reject conventional likeness in favor of psychological depth, while her collages use photocopies, archival images, and mixed media to explore fragmented histories and collective memory. The exhibition Assembled Identities brings together works from the 1980s to the present, tracing how both her portraiture and collage practice examine selfhood, cultural inheritance, and visibility. Keegan’s influence extends beyond her own art through her curatorial and archival work, and her inclusion in major exhibitions such as Women in Revolt! at Tate Britain and Electric Dreams at Tate Modern confirms her lasting significance in contemporary art history.