Ishita Chakraborty:

East Is Everywhere

11-13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris

Opening and artist talk with Prof. Françoise Vergès: May 22, 2026

Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to present East Is Everywhere, the first solo exhibition in France and the second with the gallery by Ishita Chakraborty (born in 1989 in West Bengal, India; lives and works between Switzerland and India). Her works address subjects such as climate migration, ecofeminism, and the shifting relationships between the Global South and the Global North within post-migratory societies. By “East,” the artist refers to marginalized communities across the globe - from Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa - which share a common history shaped by colonialism and extractive practices. The idea that “East Is Everywhere” thus points to a global phenomenon of circulation: the circulation of plants, bodies, images, and capital, but also the circulation of the systems of domination that emerge from them and continue to structure contemporary power relations. This reading materializes through a body of works in which landscape - understood as territory, memory, and political space - becomes a central motif. 

 

Through works specially conceived for the exhibition — including botanical illustrations painted in acrylic on canvas mounted on saree fabric from the Where the Wild Things Roam series, works on paper inspired by colonial-era maps from the I Recall the Forest Inside Me series, a monumental charcoal wall drawing, as well as several sculptural installations in unglazed or hand-painted porcelain— the artist examines how botanical circulation, land exploitation, and systems of labour have become deeply intertwined within colonial economies. Her work thus sheds light on these entangled histories of extraction and power, inscribed simultaneously within bodies and landscapes.