Ishita Chakraborty

Ishita Chakraborty (b. 1989) is an Indian-born artist who lives and works in Switzerland and India. She studied fine arts at ZHdK, Zurich, and Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She taught Fine Arts at Amity University, Kolkata. She has received the Manor Kunst Prize 2024, a Visiting Artist Fellowship at SAI Harvard University, the Jury Prize from Aargauer Kunsthaus, and a Pro Helvetia Residency in the Brazilian Amazon. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthaus Zurich, Aargauer Kunsthaus, Kunsthalle Charlottenborg (Denmark), Kulturfolger Zurich, WE ARE AIA Zurich, Vitrine Gallery Basel, and Gallery Espace India, among others.

Her artistic practice encompasses scratched drawings, installations, poetry, sound, and performance. Her work engages with contexts marked by displacement, the traumas of colonialism, articulation in language, orality, and identity. She explores strategies and narratives of resistance voiced by individuals – often from subaltern or marginalized communities. In recent projects, she examines how existential questions of human life evolve into ecological concerns. Currently, she is developing projects that focus on climate migration and ecofeminism, working across the global South and North within post-migrant societies. In doing so, she seeks a rhizomatic language that connects old and new knowledge and envisions a future beyond ownership.