Indigo: Migration Through Time

Shelly Jyoti explores displacement, cultural memory and ecological regeneration through indigo, Ajrakh and khadi

New Delhi, October 2026: Indigo: Migration Through Time, a new body of work by textile artist Shelly Jyoti, extends her long-standing investigation of indigo into the interconnected histories of human displacement, cultural transmission and ecological regeneration.

Presented as part of INDIGO: THE BLUE GOLD II at CAA Bikaner House, New Delhi, the exhibition unfolds through three interconnected movements: Faceless Journeys, Displaced Ecologies and Unresolved Geographies. Together, they examine migration not as a single historical event, but as an enduring condition that reshapes identities, landscapes and inherited knowledge across generations.

Faceless Journeys explores human displacement through anonymous figures that evoke enslaved, indentured and migrant communities whose labour enabled the global cultivation, production and movement of indigo. Although their collective labour profoundly shaped colonial economies, many individual lives remain absent from written histories. Facelessness therefore becomes both an ethical and visual strategy: rather than inventing identities, Jyoti makes their absence from the archive visible.

Displaced Ecologies turns towards seeds, plants, roots and trees. Like seeds carried from one landscape to another, displaced communities take root in unfamiliar soil—adapting, surviving and transmitting memory across generations. Descending roots and upward-reaching branches become metaphors for continuity, resilience and renewal. The survival of Ajrakh through centuries of migration similarly demonstrates how cultural knowledge can travel, transform and regenerate while preserving essential memory.

In Unresolved Geographies, the work moves towards abstraction. Boundaries between body, landscape, water and movement begin to dissolve, evoking fractured territories, shifting routes and uncertain places of belonging. Indigo becomes an expansive field of memory in which migration is understood not only as geographical displacement, but also as an ongoing passage through time, identity and consciousness.

Created through Ajrakh printing, natural dyes, handwoven khadi and layered textile processes, Indigo: Migration Through Time approaches cloth as a living archive—one capable of holding histories that may be fragmented, displaced or absent from official records.

Exhibition: INDIGO: THE BLUE GOLD II — Freedom • Trade • Migration
Artist: Shelly Jyoti
Curated by: Lisa Trivedi
Venue: CAA Bikaner House, New Delhi
Dates: 27 October–1 November 2026