Ishita Chakraborty (b. 1989) is an artist and poet born in West Bengal, India. She lives and works between Switzerland and India. She is represented by Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich and Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India.

Chakraborty’s artistic practice entails drawings, installations, sound, poetry and performance. 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. Her recent works address the issues connected to the climate crisis through an interconnected social justice lens.

She 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).

Her recent and upcoming group shows include Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, Germany (2025), APROPOS HODLER at Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland (2024), The River Flows In Our Veins, ART FLOW, Turgi, Switzerland, curated by Christoph Doswald (2025),  Seeds and Souls, curated by Christine Eyene, Kunsthalle Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2023), Imperial Silhouettes: Shadows of Sovereignty”, curated by Premjish Achari, RIZQ Art Initiative, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2025), Reimagining The Waste Land at Art Heritage Gallery, New Delhi, India (2024), solo exhibition Manor Kunstpreis Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland ( 2025), solo exhibition Freedom Is A Constant Struggle at Museo Vincenzo Vela, Mendrisio, Switzerland (2025), solo exhibition Sleeping in the Bed of Salt in Gallery Espace, New Delhi, India (2023), Solo Exhibition In Other Words at Vitrine Gallery, Basel, Switzerland (2023), Solo Exhibition I Recall The Forest Inside Me at Galerie Peter Kilchmann Zurich, Switzerland (2025), The Scent of Rice at Kulturfolger, Zurich, Switzerland (2023), 8 Weiertal Biennale Common Ground curated by Sabine Rusterholz, Switzerland (2023), Stranger in the Village Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland (2023), Co- Habitations, We ARE AIA, (2023), Zurich, Switzerland, Serendipity Art Festival Goa, India (2023), Hyundai Art For Hope (2023), India, Exotische Pflanzen Im Garten – Was tun? Auswahl 22 Aargauer Kunsthaus (2022) Switzerland, The Mouth Is For Speaking at We ARE AIA, Löwenbräu, Zurich (2022) curated by Martina Huber, LifeLines at Johann Jacobs Museum, Zurich (2021), curated by Roger M. Buergel and Francesca Ceccherini, Hermes Trismegistos Dreams of Futures within Futures at Die Diele (2021) in Zurich curated by Damian Christinger, Mother Earth Calling in Atelier Mondial(2021) in Basel, Switzerland, She recently had her solo exhibitions in Keinraum in Luzern, Switzerland(2021), Prameya Art Foundation, New Delhi, India (2020), Museum Forum Schlossplatz in Switzerland (2017). She has participated in ‘Abstract Notations’ at Gallery Espace in New Delhi (2020), Small Projects for Coming Communities, Stuttgart, Germany, and Oncurating Project Space (2019) Zurich, What Leaf? What Mushrooms? in Art Container Zurich (2019), Art for peace in Kunsthaus Zofingen in Switzerland (2017).

She has received several grants and awards, including Manor Prize (2024), Aargau, Prix Mobiliere 2024 nomination by Prof. Dr Peter J. Schneemann Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History, University of Bern, Co-Habitation Grant, Pro Helvetia South America (2025), Work Grant by Aargauer Kuratorium, Switzerland (2024), Visiting Artist Fellowship at Lakhshmi Mitaal SAI, HARVARD UNIVERSITY (2020-21), Credit Suisse Förderpreis in Switzerland (2021), Jury award “Selection 21” Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland (2022), Research Grant from Aargauer Kuratorium in Switzerland(2021), POP UP Project grant Pro Helvetia Switzerland (2021), ZHdK Avina Foundation grant in Switzerland (2020).

Chakraborty was awarded a Pro Helvetia Residency in Brazil Amazon(2024), Gästeatelier Krone residency in Switzerland (2017) and Piramal Museum of Art residency in Mumbai, India (2016). She has presented artist talks in WE ARE AIA, Löwenbräu Zurich(2022-23), Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland (2021), KHOJ PEERS Residency, New Delhi, India (2018), Culture Clash in Dock Basel, Switzerland (2017), Rajya Charukala Parishad in Kolkata (2017), and Museum Forum Schloss Platz Aarau, Switzerland (2017).

“Valay Gada is an artist and designer whose works reflect his concerns linked to the impact of rapid urbanization and man’s relationship with nature. Valay’s sculptures of botanical forms, scaled up to larger than life proportions, articulate a heightened artistic appreciation of nature’s beauty, as also the importance of plants in climate change and as sources of therapy.

Born into a Jain family, Jainism’s core tenets of non-violence, asceticism and mindful living have closely shaped Valay’s aesthetics. His works emphasise the inter-connectedness of living things, the understanding that every action has the potential to cause suffering to another and one of the keys to contain this is to consume ethically and sustainably. As his work matures it has become more political in its response to human and animal rights, freedom of speech and sexuality.

Valay has shown internationally at galleries/fairs in Germany and Australia (National Art School, Sydney), and in several cities in India. He received the “Elle Décor International Design Award” for Young Talent of the Year 2014 and “Trends Excellence in Architecture and Design” award 2016.

Valay lives and works in New Delhi.

Zarina (1937-2020) was born in Aligarh (India), where her father was a professor at Aligarh Muslim University. The artist’s earliest, happiest years were spent in the bungalow allotted to her father there. The house, its layout, and its garden remained with her through her life – the first of many houses that feature in her art. Partition created a disruption in this idyll, and though the family lived on in India until the early 1950s, the ‘Dividing Line’ was to forever alter the fabric of her life. It is the first of many displacements whose memory and pain became the fount of her art.

Zarina’s brush with art, especially print-making, began in Bangkok where she moved after her marriage. It is here that she, then in her early twenties, began taking lessons in woodcut printing from a Thai artist. Later, when her husband, an officer in the foreign service, was posted in Paris Zarina seized the opportunity to apprentice with Stanley William Hayter at his legendary workshop Atelier 17. In 1974 she spent a year in Japan on a Japan Foundation grant studying Japanese woodblock printing. Later she moved to the US, where she lived for most of the next four decades.

An adherence to the personal and the essential defined Zarina’s work, its stark and minimal quality tempered by texture and materiality. She worked in various mediums – intaglio, woodblocks, lithography and silkscreen – and many of her works were in ‘portfolios’, a series of prints exploring connected ideas. In addition to printing on paper, she also explored its material possibilities by puncturing, weaving, scratching or sewing on it. She also created sculptures using material such as bronze, aluminium, steel, wood, tin and paper pulp. Having travelled the world and lived in many cities, Zarina incorporated maps in her works, which expanded to include the topographical details of cities whose histories had been marred by political conflict—Aligarh, New Delhi, New York, Baghdad, Kabul. She captured the collective experience of trauma with an economy of line, abstracted geometry, essential colours and the evocation of a slowly dying language: Urdu, her personal vocabulary transcending into political statement.

Zarina had several solo exhibitions at Gallery Espace, New Delhi which represents her in Asia. In a long and distinguished career, she had exhibitions in galleries and museums across the world. She represented India at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and her work features in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hammer Museum. Zarina had retrospective exhibition at Hammer Museum in 2012, followed a year later by Guggenheim Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2020 – 2021, Zarina: A Life in Nine Lines, was shown at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (New Delhi) and at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (St. Louis, USA).

Zarina was the recipient of several awards, having received the President’s Award for Printmaking, India in 1969 and the Residency Award of New York University’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute in 2017. She was also Artist-in-Residence at the University of Richmond and taught at several universities such as the New York Feminist Art Institute, Cornel University and New York University.

Sheetal Gattani’s abstract paintings on paper and canvas are studies in colour, texture and light, executed with a spare palette shorn of gestural flourishes or definable forms. ‘I work towards a complete integration of medium, form, colour and texture,’ the artist says. Process is central to her practice – she doesn’t begin with an idea of what she’s going to paint, but ‘discovers’ little by little as she works, making room for the unexpected, the unpredictable. Sheetal’s works grow out of a rigorous making – the paper/canvas painted over and over in multiple layers and colours, the paper scratched with blade, carved, peeled and then covered in watercolour, charcoal or dry pastel, scraped out, the same process repeated several times in a ‘dialogue’ between medium and time. The results are works of quiet power that engender a feeling that is elevating though indefinable and intangible.

A resident of Mumbai, Sheetal did not believe she would be an artist or think of art seriously until she joined the famed Sir J.J. School of Art in the city with the intention of teaching art to young children. She completed a diploma in Art Education from that institution in 1990, and went on to pursue an M.F.A. in painting.

Sheetal has had several solo shows and taken part in group exhibitions across India and the world.

Sunil Gawde (born 1960, Mumbai) trained as a painter but his practice has evolved in later decades to include sculptures and kinetic installations. Gawde has showed at galleries, museums, fairs and biennales across the world. At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, ‘Alliteration’, a two-ton kinetic piece by Gawde, was included in the exhibition ‘Making Worlds’, curated by Daniel Birnbaum. ‘Vicious Circle’, a 12-foot stainless steel pendulum, was part of ‘Finding India’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2010; and in 2007, Gawde’s black, oversized ‘Blind Bulbs’ dominated Jumeira beach (and St.Tropez earlier) at the Special Projects section of Gulf Art Fair. Gawde has also done several commissioned public art projects, including a 3-tonne mechanized sculpture, ‘Galileo and his friends left me with these moons…’ (2012), as part of a HSR (high speed railway) Project by the Taiwan government – he was one of five artists invited. That year, he was also invited to create a public sculpture at the 'Parc De Sculptures’ in Al-Maaden, Marrakech (Morocco).

Among the other prominent international exhibitions Gawde has been part of are ‘Paris-Delhi-Bombay…’ (2011), curated by Sophie Duplaix & Fabrice Bousteau at the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and ‘SPARSHA – Touching the senses, Ritual and contemporary Art’ (2014), curated by Thomas Hensolt at the Kunstmuseum Bochum in Germany.

The artist lives and works in Mumbai.

Sharad Sonkusale’s large and abstract canvases are meditations on grey, with hints of colour, and sometimes a touch of gold. His practice, arising from a core of personal and spiritual associations, is deeply meditative. Sharad begins by painting his canvases black – the ‘universal void’ he calls it – and then proceeds to cover it with small squares of rice paper and sometimes newspaper, to create a translucent layer of square grids. He then paints over this, beginning with the dot, a point of focused attention, which then aggregates to form dabs, dashes and lines that travel horizontally and vertically, and sometimes diagonally across the visual plane, creating abstract meandering patterns. The effect is that of an emotional landscape, a reflection of the artist’s own interiority, perhaps, but also one that invites viewers to engage with the surface and make of it what he will. Sharad is greatly inspired by Indian classical music and likens his work to its vibrations. Music often plays in the background while he paints, and sometimes he even carries his instruments to the studio.  

Sharad Sonkusale has an MFA in painting from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai and a BFA from the Government Chitrakala Maha Vidyalay, Nagpur. He is a recipient of the 2016 National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Junior Fellowship of the Union Ministry of Culture. He has participated in several group exhibitions across India including the 2017 Biennale at Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.