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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.
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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.
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The exhibition opens with Where the Wild Things Roam XXXVI, Indigo (140 × 112.5 cm), part of the eponymous series in which Ishita Chakraborty presents botanical illustrations painted in acrylic on canvas mounted on saree fabric, then cut out along their contours.These forms depict plants introduced from the Global South during the colonial period, whose trajectories are inseparable from systems of extraction and territorial transformation. Indigo stands as an emblematic example: imposed through British plantations, its forced cultivation profoundly disrupted local ecosystems and societies, ultimately leading to the Indigo Revolt of 1859. From a plant rooted in its environment, it became a symbol of a violent colonial economy, transforming not only the land itself but also social practices and imaginaries. By pasting a traditional Indian textile worn by women like a second skin on the canvas as a backside, the artist establishes an intimate connection between plant, body, and material. The saree becomes the support for an embodied memory where colonial history, femininity, and transmission intersect. The act of cutting itself evokes a form of visual extraction: the image is removed from the herbarium, detached from its scientific context, and reinscribed within a new space of interpretation. The visible presence of the reverse side of the fabric, at times revealed through folding as in the work Where the Wild Things Roam XXI, Nutmeg (55.5 × 43.5 cm, framed) or through suspension, underscores this tension between surface and depth, visibility and concealment, as if, in the artist’s words, it “is like peeling off the skin of history.”
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In the same room, two works from the series I Recall the Forest Inside Me are displayed near Resistance IX (76 × 64 cm), establishing both a formal and narrative dialogue between these two bodies of work. Maps and barbed wire respond to one another through their shared function of delimiting and controlling territories. Barbed wire, an emblematic invention of Western modernity, appears as a symbol of borders and restricted circulation; it embodies a systemic violence inscribed within space itself. Here, Ishita Chakraborty reinterprets it through porcelain and artisanal gestures: their apparent delicacy, at times evoking doodles, an unfinished poem, or the undulation of waves, contrasts with the brutality of the motif, transforming an instrument of constraint into a sign of resistance and vulnerability.
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The body here is never neutral. It is covered, wrapped, as though inhabited by layers of memory. The saree as second skin and the old maps placed like a veil settle upon it. What covers also becomes what marks: a persistent presence, almost invisible yet indelible. As though history were not merely being told, but continued to live directly upon the skin.
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Extending this reflection on bodies and territories marked by history, the work Plantes Tropicales (300 x 500 cm) covers one of the walls in the left gallery space. This mural drawing with charcoal on untreated cotton canvas - a material directly linked to circuits of trade and capital - it appears like a fragment of earth or forest extracted and displaced into the exhibition space. Tree motifs emerge, suggesting tropical landscapes, while darkened areas evoke uprooted soil and emptied spaces, traces of overexploited and exhausted territories. On the left side of the composition appears a female figure drawn from a colonial-era photograph, whose presence recalls historical visual dispositifs and the Western male gaze that so strongly contributed to the exoticization and objectification of colonized and enslaved bodies. In the background, the history of sugarcane plantations emerges: following the abolition of slavery, these systems of exploitation persisted through indentured labour, which organized the contractual migration of thousands of Indian workers to the British colonies in the Caribbean well into the 20th century.
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In the final room, Ishita Chakraborty presents her new series of works Black Gold and Caoutchouc, developed following her residency in the Amazon within the Borari community. Eleven porcelain rubber seeds are suspended from the ceiling using artificial hair, forming a kind of floating forest that is at once organic and unsettling. Nearby, cacao pods, also made of porcelain and hand-painted extend this immersive environment. Through these forms, the artist continues her reflection on the circulation and transformation of natural resources, foregrounding the shift of these elements - from entities once rooted within ecosystems and local, sometimes sacred, uses - toward logics of globalized production and consumption. Cacao and rubber thus become material witnesses to histories of extraction, displacement, and capitalization. The use of porcelain, a material historically associated with commerce and luxury in Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introduces a symbolic reversal: what once belonged to living, organic matter is here frozen, transformed, and preciously reconfigured.
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As throughout the rest of her work, materials, bodies, and histories overlap: the seed becomes an archive, matter becomes memory, and the forest itself emerges as a space traversed by systems of power whose traces continue to persist today.
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Galerie Peter Kilchmann
11-13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris
, 23 May - 25 July 2026
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