This mutable installation by Manish Nai, featuring 100 pillars wrapped in dyed jute, debuted in the prestigious Meridians sector of Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019. It elegantly expresses Nai’s abiding interest in discovering the abstract dimensions of form through the physical manipulation of matter. The work in concentrated on the material qualities of the different substances Nai has elected to deploy—material that evoke the histories of the South Asia subcontinent, alluding to its links to colonialism and the institution of debt-based slavery. British colonialists wreaked social and ecological havoc on the population of Bengal by forcing farmers to cultivate indigo instead of the food crops required for survival, and charged huge rates of interests to farmers on loans for indigo farming. This eventually led to the Indigo Revolt of 1859, where indentured indigo farmers rose up against the ruling colonial and land-owning classes before being brutally suppressed. During the first World War, when synthetic indigo from Germany stopped being available in Britain, Indian farmers were again pressed to grow the plant. An agitation launched by indigo farmers in 1917 in a district called Champaran in the northern state of Bihar became the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s introduction of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, to the Indian freedom movement. Nai's work layers these histories of labor, anti-imperialist struggle, and the materiality of culture in a formal practice which also draws influence from minimalism, architecture, environmentalism, and contemporary urban India.  Within Nai’s abstraction, loss does not occur. Rather, like the bodies that have occupied the clothes now compressed into slender pillars, the object as object disappears only to reappear immediately (clued in the pillars by the chance button, depiction, and pattern) with a renewed sensibility and presence. Nai seems interested in the new life assumed by his particular repertory of cast-offs as a result of their metamorphosis, the change in their condition from objects of use (jute, cardboard, newspapers, old clothes) to objects divested of any function or utility, that is to say, objects in their condition as art.