The exhibition title — The Poetics of Juxtaposition & The Soft Rustle of Time, evokes a sensory threshold: the moment when two visual worlds share space and together create a presence neither could hold alone. This is not a clash of difference, but a creative meeting: archival memory and lived experience converge, opening a quiet, charged field where meaning begins to take shape. As one spends time with the works, what first appears as adjacent motifs transforms into layered textures, shifting tones, and gentle chromatic reverberations. The eye drifts, returns, accumulates — perception moves, accumulates, and reconsiders itself.
The use of natural dyeing, indigo, pomegranate rind, and onion peel adds a further layer: domestic space, craft, cyclical labour, the rhythm of making. These natural dyes bring with them subtle variability, giving the cloth an organic depth that synthetic dyes rarely offer. Historical motifs, miniatures, botanical illustrations, and colonial prints meet everyday textures and domestic material on cloth; as they pass through fibre and dye, they don’t remain fixed. They breathe, shift, merge or recede; each immersion alters the relationship between colour, fibre, and image.
Juxtaposition here becomes tenderness: allowing differing materials, times, and references to lean into each other to hide, reveal, meld, and separate again. The “soft rustle of time” is the gentle sound of dye settling, cloth ageing, memory layering, soft gradients, subtle shifts, quiet resonance. Across the textiles, colour responds to fibre, images shift through dye, and everyday and historical references coexist with sensitivity. This slow unfolding resists instant reading or fixed narrative; instead, it invites duration, quiet attention, and the possibility of layered meaning. In that unfolding in the rustle of time, difference enriches, and new forms of connection emerge.
Venue: Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi
Dates: December 10 – December 16, 2025
Opening hours: 11:30 AM - 7:00 PM