Artist Showcase: Historicization, Art, and the Socio-Politics of India: An Artist's Perspective

This lecture examines the intersections of historicization, material culture, and socio-political struggle in India through an interdisciplinary art practice that engages with Ajrakh block printing, indigo dye, and khadi cloth. Working outside the academy yet in sustained dialogue with postcolonial theory, Jyoti uses textile-based installations as “visual essays” to reframe histories of colonial exploitation, migration, and resistance.

Drawing on works such as Indigo: The Blue Gold and The 18th Century Merchant Ship, Jyoti interrogates how indigo functioned as both commodity and instrument of colonial capitalism. In Faceless Journeys, anonymity becomes a metaphor for the erasure of migrant subjectivities, while The Khadi March: Just Five Meters reanimates Gandhi’s call for swadeshi by situating khadi within contemporary debates on sustainability and rural livelihoods.

Jyoti's practice approaches textiles as living archives that embody transnational exchanges and subaltern histories, tracing their movements from Sindh and Gujarat to global circuits of trade and consumption. By employing materiality—cloth, color, and motif—as sites of memory and resistance, she explores how art can perform the work of historicization and offer critical interventions into postcolonial discourse.

The lecture invites reflection on how creative practices might be read as forms of scholarship, challenging conventional boundaries between archive and artwork, academic and artisan, past and present.

Please register at https://myumi.ch/qZ213 to receive the Zoom link before the event.