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.

 

Her sculptural works, such as the Resistance series, exemplifies this ethos. Delicate porcelain objects, painstakingly hand-shaped into barbed-wire forms, are arranged across walls. Initially evoking scribbles, Braille, or ocean waves, these sculptural installations transforms upon closer inspection into a meditation on borders, belonging, and exclusion. In this intricate material, the harsh symbolism of barbed wire is subverted—resistance is reimagined as fragility, resilience, and care. Through such works, Chakraborty not only critiques mechanisms of state control and border violence but also calls viewers into active participation in urgent political debates.

 

Land and landscape remain central to her practice, envisioned as paradoxical sites of beauty and vitality as well as exploitation, extraction, and displacement. In her mural The Soil We Were Born (795 × 300 cm) shown at Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich, tropical trees rendered in grey chalk stretch across walls, their imagery bleeding into stairways and upper floors. A companion work depicts a colonial-era plant on cut canvas, affixed to sari fabric, drawing from archival plantation records, Amazonian fieldwork, and botanical wallpapers. The lush green plant reveals its reverse side as an orange and red floral sari—an inexpensive textile associated with domestic labor and rural women. This layering of plant imagery with fabric traditions creates a visual archive of entangled histories, where colonial economies and aesthetic appropriations remain deeply interwoven.

 

Her series I Recall the Forest Inside Me further complicates these entanglements through cartography. Here, Chakraborty photographs herself cloaked in colonial and contemporary maps—British plantation maps, Amazonian deforestation sites, disputed borders— transforming them into second skins. Hand-colored onto agave paper, these works probe the lingering weight of colonial cartographies on postcolonial bodies, especially those of people of color. By inhabiting maps as veils, the artist underscores how they have long functioned as instruments of domination, tools for consolidating power, erasing Indigenous systems of knowledge, and imposing borders.

 

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

 

The artist has held solo exhibitions at institutions including Aargauer Kunsthaus (2025/2023), Museo Vincenzo Vela, Mendrisio (2025), Whispering Benches, PH Public Project (2022), Prameya Art Foundation, New Delhi (2020), Art Container Zurich, and Kunstraum ZHdK (both 2019). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona, RIZQ Art, Abu Dhabi (all 2024); Aargauer Kunsthaus (2024/2023/2021); Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Denmark (2023- 2024); WE ARE AIA, Löwenbräu Kunst, Helmhaus Zürich (both 2022); Löwenbräu Kunst, Zurich (2021); and Kunsthaus Zofingen (2017). She has been granted, among others, the Pro Helvetia Brazil Amazon Residency, Manor Art Prize Aarau, Aargauer Kuratorium Art Grant (all 2024); Hyundai Art Grant, India (2022), and Credit Suisse Art Grant (2021) and nominated for Prix Mobiliar Art Geneve (2024). Currently, her installation The River Flows In Our Veins is on view inside the historic wooden bridge in Turgi as part of the project ART FLOW – Art in the Limmatal.