The Blue Revolution: Madras Art Weekend Celebrates Indigo’s Craft and Culture

Updated: December 03, 2025 00:06

Image Source: Moneycontrol

At Madras Art Weekend 2025, Indigo Flower by 11.11/eleven eleven transforms Chennai’s rich textile and maritime past into an immersive indigo installation. Visitors walk through trays of plant-based indigo paste, leaving footprint artworks that echo India’s fraught histories of trade, colonial extraction and resistance, while foregrounding sustainable, craft-led futures.

Madras Art Weekend, opening across Chennai from December 3–6, 2025, is using the city’s own textile legacy as a stage for a powerful indigo-led conversation on trade, labour and memory. The centrepiece is Indigo Flower, an installation by craft-focused label 11.11/eleven eleven, presented at Collage Chennai as part of the festival programming.

Key highlight: Indigo as lived history

The installation places natural indigo within India’s long textile and maritime trade histories, from colonial-era plantations in Bengal and Madras to global exports of cotton and dyed cloth that once sailed out of this coast.
By foregrounding resist-dye traditions and handloom cultures, it reminds audiences that the blue dye was both an artistic medium and a driver of colonial-era exploitation and peasant uprisings.

Key highlight: Footprints as counter-memory

Visitors step into trays of plant-based indigo paste to create footprint-based artworks, turning the body into a drawing tool inside the gallery.
These imprints symbolically reclaim the labour of indigo workers, recasting it as agency, play and collective mark-making rather than coerced plantation work.

Key highlight: Craft, research and sustainability

Indigo Flower grows out of more than a decade of research at 11.11’s Colour Lab on plant-based pigments and slow craft techniques like shibori, bandhani and tie-resist.
The show also launches the brand’s new Indigo Paste, shifting indigo from being just a dye to a versatile medium for printing, drawing and large-format textile artworks.

Key highlight: Chennai’s textile memory

Hosting the installation during Madras Art Weekend underscores Chennai’s own history as a textile and export hub, from Bleeding Madras checks to contemporary handloom innovation.
The city-wide festival theme of reimagining Madras helps situate Indigo Flower as both homage and critique, bridging historical trade routes with today’s conversations on ethical fashion and cultural memory.

Sources: Moneycontrol, Homegrown, Collage Chennai, Caleidoscope, official Madras Art Weekend communications.

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