Ishita Chakraborty

Visual Arts

Ishita Chakraborty’s art practice is marked by the traces: displacement, traumas of colonialism, articulation in language, orality, and identity. It investigates strategies and discourses of resistance narrated by individuals who create a narrative of micro-histories that conventional history has not been able to tell. In «Resistência: The Voices of the Rivers», the artist will continue a project that investigated the climate migration in Sundarbans Forest, in India. Now in the Brazilian Amazon, she intends to combine these two worlds’ encounters with animals, plants, insects, water, people, spirits, and voices as an inseparable community. She proposes a collaboration with local artists, research on indigenous knowledge on fungi and resistance, besides an immersion in more sustainable, collective, and ecological artmaking.

Ishita Chakraborty [IN/CH] is an artist and poet born in West Bengal, India, living and working between Switzerland and India. She has received her MFA degree in 2021 from ZHdk (Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland) and another MFA in 2013 from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She taught Fine Arts as an assistant professor at Amity University, Kolkata (2016-2018). Ishita’s artistic practice entails scratched drawings, installations, poetry, performance, and sound. She investigates the strategies and the discourse of resistance narrated by individuals — often the subalterns. Their contexts are marked by the traces of displacement, the trauma of colonialism, their articulation in language, oral history, and identity.