• Alaiia has always loved the colour blue. “I think that is what led me to the Indigo Project,” she says, when we connect over an international call. “The whole idea of being covered in a pigment, especially blue, appealed to me and it became an obsession. It was only later that I began to look into its colonial underpinnings, like how the workers are exploited. That really opened up the project to a larger social context,” she says.
  • The youngest of the Gujral clan, who studied Print Media and Fibers at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is currently involved in a number of projects that look into community building, public art and city planning. Her approach is multi-disciplinary and cuts across mediums and genres.
  • “My initial interest in indigo was spurred by watching [the family’s 200-year-old Portuguese house in Goa] being painted post every monsoon,” she adds. The paint — a mixture of natural Indigo pigment, eggshells and glue — is not purely decorative, but used for its cooling effect and insect repellent properties. “Indigo pigment is a living, breathing colour that has completely consumed my artistic life,” she says.
  • Building community
  • The Indigo Project has taken many forms, from installations to garments, performance art, and digital media. It also extends to her new project, Xenophilia , which questions the global political climate characterised by fear, suspicion and aversion to the other. “The exhibition imagined a different reality in which fear is replaced by curiosity,” says Alaiia, who co-curated and participated in the project that featured a dynamic selection of painting, sculpture, textile and photo-based work. Another project that she is currently working on is Forward Thinking , which brings art fashion and technology together. It looks at transforming rough neighbourhoods with art and theatre.
  • While she admits her mother and she have distinct tastes in art — Feroze is drawn to conceptual art and Alaiia to the process — her mum is her constant support. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a great art collection of her own. On her recent birthday, her father surprised her with one of her grandfather’s early paintings, which he’d created when in Mexico with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. “I love it and its my prized possession,” she signs off.