Ishita ChakrabortyI Recall The Forest Inside Me

Overview

Galerie Peter Kilchmann presents I Recall The Forest Inside Me, the first solo exhibition of Manor Art Prize 2024 winner Ishita Chakraborty. The show reflects on the artist’s personal connection to landscapes, migration, and memory, inspired by her upbringing in India and her recent residency in the Brazilian Amazon. Through works ranging from wall paintings, drawings on sari fabric, glass sculptures, and porcelain objects, Chakraborty explores land as both a place of beauty and vitality and a site of exploitation, displacement, and colonial history.

The exhibition investigates the entangled histories of plants, borders, and postcolonial identities. Vividly colored botanical paintings cut along their contours, map-based self-portraits, and fragile sculptures made of glass and porcelain open a poetic space for reflection on power structures, environmental extraction, and the traumas carried by bodies and landscapes. Despite addressing urgent socio-political themes, Chakraborty’s approach remains accessible and poetic, inviting viewers to contemplate how histories of colonization, migration, and gender intersect with the natural world.