Curator: Anouchka Panchard
Curatorial Assistant: Renée Schwerzmann
Ishita Chakraborty — Manor Art Prize 2024 Exhibition
In 2025, artist and poet Ishita Chakraborty presented her major solo exhibition Manor Art Prize 2024 at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, following her selection as the recipient of the prestigious Manor Art Prize Aarau 2024. The exhibition was on view from 24 May to 24 August 2025. The exhibition brought together newly commissioned installations, sound works, murals, drawings, and sculptural interventions that explored the intersections of ecology, migration, colonial histories, environmental extraction, and political resistance. Through a poetic and research-driven approach, Chakraborty examined how landscapes, plants, borders, and bodies are shaped by systems of power and displacement.
Among the central works were Between the Land and Sea, a series of fragile glass barricades that transformed instruments of separation into delicate and vulnerable structures; Resistance II, sculptural forms made from unglazed porcelain barbed wire; and O bastante!, a large-scale drawing installation reflecting on tropical ecologies and the historical circulation of plants through colonial networks. A newly commissioned sound work featuring a song in a rare Persian dialect expanded the exhibition's investigation of language, migration, and cultural memory.
Chakraborty's use of unconventional materials—including glass, porcelain, chalk, sound, and organic imagery—created a dialogue between fragility and resilience. Throughout the exhibition, barriers became permeable, plants emerged as witnesses to histories of movement and exploitation, and acts of resistance were imagined through poetic rather than monumental gestures. The works invited viewers to consider how ecological crises, state violence, and colonial legacies remain deeply interconnected in the contemporary world.
The Manor Art Prize exhibition also highlighted Chakraborty's longstanding engagement with collaborative research, environmental justice, and decolonial perspectives. Rather than presenting history as a fixed narrative, the exhibition proposed alternative ways of remembering and relating to the world—through listening, collective memory, and an attention to overlooked forms of life.
As the recipient of the Manor Art Prize, Chakraborty joined a distinguished lineage of artists recognized for making significant contributions to contemporary Swiss art. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication that documents the new body of work and situates it within her broader artistic practice.
Acknowledgments
Samrat Banerjee, Stefan Bauer, Viktor Benev, Vandria Borari, Urmila Chouteau, Manuel Cota, Bilyana Furnadzhieva, Nathanael Gautschi, Khokan Giri, Reza Hazare, Thomas Kern, Hura Mirshekari, Anouchka Panchard Muriel Thoma, David Trüb, Pro Helvetia South America and the team and volunteers of Aargauer Kunsthaus, Canton of Aargau, the Aargau Art Association, Manor, the City of Aarau and the Federal Office of Culture.