Ishita Chakraborty Born 1989 in West Bengal, India

Lives and works in Switzerland and India

In recent years, Chakraborty’s inquiry has expanded toward the entanglement of existential and ecological questions. Her projects increasingly address climate migration, ecofeminism, and the shifting relations between the Global South and North in post-migrant societies. Seeking what she calls a “rhizomatic language”—a form of expression that binds old and new knowledge—she challenges dominant systems of ownership and gestures toward collective futures.

Land and landscape remain central to her practice, envisioned as paradoxical sites of beauty, vitality, exploitation, and displacement. Her works often layer imagery, archival materials, and textiles to create visual archives of entangled histories, where colonial economies and aesthetic appropriations intersect.

Through her materially diverse and conceptually rigorous works, Ishita Chakraborty unsettles linear narratives of history and belonging, reimagining spaces where resistance, memory, and ecology intersect. Her practice is at once poetic and political, fragile and unyielding.

She has received grants and residencies, including the Pro Helvetia Brazil Amazon Residency, São Paulo (2024); Manor Art Prize, Aarau (2024); Aargauer Kuratorium Art Grant, Aarau (2024); Hyundai Art Grant, New Delhi (2022); and Credit Suisse Art Grant, Zurich (2021), and was nominated for the Prix Mobiliar Art Genève, Geneva (2024).