State of Indigo
London Design Biennale 2018
I was selected as a featured artists for as well as worked with The Gujral Foundation as a research consultant for the State of Indigo.
The India Pavilion evoked the emotional charge of indigo, a natural pigment closely aligned with India’s design identity. It will immerse visitors in the troughs used in an indigo farm, where workers thrash water with their outstretched legs, making us complicit in their plight. Inseparable from luxury and desire on the one hand, and labour exploitation on the other, indigo is an ideologically loaded design tool. Once highly precious and known as “blue gold”, a yard of indigo was once traded for a slave, yet today, its global manifestation as denim, brings us together in a commonality of contemporary life.
