Ishita Chakraborty practice can be understood through what she describes as an ecofeminist methodology of repair: an approach that refuses to treat ecology, economy, gender, and colonial history as separate subjects. It attends to strategies and narratives of resistance articulated by individuals and communities whose knowledge and histories have often been marginalised or rendered subaltern.

The series Where the Wild Things Roam explores histories of the circulation and extraction of resources from colonised countries of the Global South. The works are painted in acrylic on jute, then mounted on Chappa saree, a traditional Indian textile, before being cut out along their contours.

For this presentation in the Grand Staircase of the Monnaie de Paris, Ishita Chakraborty has created five new works depicting cotton, fig, geranium, corn, and jamun. Their trajectories tell very different stories of circulation. Cotton is closely intertwined with the development of colonial economies and transatlantic trade; corn, originally from Mexico, crossed the Atlantic after 1492 as part of the so-called Columbian Exchange, before becoming an agricultural crop in Europe. Geranium, native to South Africa, was introduced into European horticulture and later cultivated in several French colonial territories, particularly for the perfume industry. Jamun, native to South and Southeast Asia, circulated through gardens, medicinal practices, food cultures, and colonial botanical enterprises. The fig tree, whose dissemination dates back much further, reflects other forms of circulation linked to agricultural and commercial exchanges around the Mediterranean. Together, these plants reveal the diversity of the trajectories through which species, resources, and knowledge have circulated between territories.

Suspended in the space, the works appear detached from their natural environments, as they are from the botanical plates that served as the artist’s starting point. Their suspension evokes both their displacement and their uprooting.

Louis Le Kim’s practice explores the intersections of space, memory, and architecture, drawing on his experiences of hidden urban environments and remote historical sites across the world to create enigmatic landscapes that oscillate between reality, dream, and speculation. Presented by Artuner, the exhibition will bring together a site-specific body of work conceived in dialogue with the space, featuring a new series of paintings created specifically for the exhibition.

About Artuner

Founded by Eugenio Re Rebaudengo in 2013, ARTUNER mounts curated exhibitions of contemporary art. ARTUNER has distinguished itself through its hybrid approach, exhibiting works both online and via pop-up shows throughout Europe. ARTUNER provides guidance and expertise for collectors through educational contents on the site and a rigorous approach towards the selection of artists and projects. It offers a curated selection of artworks for sale.

Ce Que La Matière Garde brings together Japanese ceramicist Kazunori Hamana and French textile artist Marie Hazard for the first time in the peristyle courtyard of the Monnaie de Paris. The exhibition creates a dialogue between two vernacular traditions and two geographies: Japanese ceramics, rooted in the lineage of prehistoric tsubo jars, and weaving, which Marie Hazard pushes far beyond its conventional boundaries. Both artists share the same ethic toward raw material—one marked by neither neutrality nor dominance: the medium resists, suggests, and deviates, and the artist follows.

Their practices share a dedication to slow rhythms, repeated gestures, and surfaces that bear the mark of both time and the physical body. For both, process precedes object: the act of making is itself the form. In a world driven by speed and mass reproducibility, they raise the same fundamental question: at what point does an object begin to carry the trace of what brought it into being?

Here, surface becomes skin. The skin of Hamana’s jars bears scratches and engravings, as though the clay retained a lingering memory of a prior presence. The surface of Hazard’s weavings is not a closed membrane, but a permeable threshold that visitors approach, brush against, and step through. The weave does not enclose; it connects.

The works are scaled to the human body—they are not merely looked at, but encountered. The object ceases to be an end in itself; matter becomes context, and the space itself turns habitable, navigable, and deeply sensible.

Neither Hamana nor Hazard are craftsmen in the heritage sense. Both disrupt, question, and reinvent their traditions, guided by a shared devotion to what raw material can still teach us. Ultimately, the exhibition speaks to transmission: not of codified know-how, but of an unspoken memory embedded within the substance of things.

For Asia NOW 2026, Mamali Shafahi & Domenico Gutknecht present a new installation centred on a monumental blue figure. Kneeling within an organic landscape, surrounded by flowers and gestures of concealment, she appears as an almost mythological presence, bringing together beauty and violence, softness and force, vulnerability and agency.

Echoes of figures such as Medusa and Anahita place her within a lineage of mythological beings that embody contradictory forces. Hands obscure her face, holding the figure in an ambiguous space between protection, restraint and self-concealment.

Five coloured mirrors multiply the figure into shifting versions of herself. Changing through colour, angle and light, each reflection offers a different perception of the same body. The mirrors become portals, absorbing the sculpture, the surrounding architecture and the visitors themselves into a constantly changing image.

The installation embraces uncertainty as a space of possibility: a body becomes an image, the image becomes
many, and somewhere between them, a new mythology begins to emerge.

Payal Arya is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Delhi. She engages with science, ecology, history, and personal narratives to examine the intersection of the self and the non-self. Working across several media, her practice questions ideas of distance, position, and bodily tolerance to rethink what it means to have agency. She is currently teaching within the BFA program at O.P. Jindal Global University.

For Asia NOW 2026, the artist presents मुड पान दी इच्छा (An Intangible Claim), a film dedicated to the artist’s late naani (maternal grandmother) that questions the right to claim and own land, bringing together the histories of Partition and reclamation through the memory of a body displaced across time and borders.

Extending the discussion on global inequality, Kallat’s large-scale wall triptych, as well as prints entitled Pattern Recognition draw attention to the ever-shifting, yet perpetually unequal politics of worldwide access and mobility.

Appropriating the format of Snellen charts (typically used to test vision), Kallat presents three pyramidical representations that feature maps of different countries. The charts are based on data from Henley’s Passport Index, which ranks nations on the strength of their passports, determined by the travel freedoms granted to their citizens. The maps of countries with visa-free travel to more regions are larger and placed higher on the charts, while countries with more travel restrictions appear below in smaller scale. The consistently significant gap between countries with the highest and lowest mobilities suggests persistent global travel imbalance. While national borders appear recurrently in Kallat’s practice, Pattern Recognition expands the conversation to encompass privilege and policy. Despite the perception of a globally interconnected world—as represented by the electric cords in the triptych for instance—physical constraints and bureaucratic measures continue to reinforce inequalities and impede mobility.

Reena Saini Kallat’s (b. 1973, Delhi, India – based in Mumbai) artistic journey encompasses drawing, photography, sculpture, and video. Her exploration of political and social borders, and their often violent impact on land, communities, and nature, reflects the enduring reverberations of the Partition in India, a nistory deeply telt by her paternal family.

WuduMedia explores how contemporary Muslim visual culture is shaped through digital media. Drawing from a manually assembled archive of videos collected from social media platforms across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, Anhar Salem conducts a digital ethnographic investigation into the circulation of Islamic images.

The title refers to wudu (وضوء), the Islamic practice of ritual washing before prayer, traditionally associated with purification and preparation. Here, wudu becomes a conceptual framework: Just as water flows through the body during wudu, digital media flows continuously carrying images, beliefs,

symbols, and identities across borders and communities. The work asks how media itself has become a fluid social environment through which religious identity is expressed.

Combining found online footage with modified digital imagery, the video unfolds as an endless social media feed in which sermons, nasheeds, motivational videos, advertisements, memes, and everyday recordings appear alongside one another. Rather than focusing on artificial intelligence alone, WuduMedia examines the wider infrastructures that govern the circulation of images, transformed through the intersection of global media, local traditions, and national identities.

Textile art and printmaking techniques are central to Amalia Laurent’s work. Batik, a traditional fabric-dyeing technique, lies at the heart of her practice. She retains from it the precision of the gesture and the slowness of the process. For her, fabric is a surface where signs and traces intersect, to be read through historical, anthropological and topographical perspectives.

Her work questions official maps, territorial boundaries and the lines imposed by history, Western knowledge and technical systems. Her textiles become maps of voids, sometimes revealing the underlying traces of places. Conceived in relation to the spaces in which they are exhibited, her works do not seek to dress the architecture, but to reveal the marks left by successive passages.

At the Monnaie de Paris, the Neoclassical columns embody an ideal of order inherited from the imperial past. Behind this apparent purity lie political constructions and power relations. The transparent fabric echoes the architectural forms while gradually disintegrating. The subtle intervention evokes what the stone preserves of past passages and forms. Ghosts of walls linger in the space.

Inspired by French Baroque architecture, The Structure of Polarity unfolds as a journey through an impossible architectural landscape. Echoing the dreamlike aesthetics of the first generations of AI image models, painterly forms dissolve into monumental staircases, arches and impossible perspectives, where luminous white and black figures traverse two mirrored realities.

One world appears radiant and familiar, while the other is its photographic negative, created through the inversion of light and colour. The figures embody opposing perceptions of artificial intelligence: enthusiasm and fear, optimism and skepticism, creation and uncertainty. As they move through the architecture, their paths progressively intertwine until they ultimately merge into a single presence.

By combining references to French architectural heritage with the distinctive visual vocabulary of early generative AI, the work reflects on the polarization surrounding artificial intelligence and, more broadly, the tendency of contemporary society to embrace opposing extremes. Yet this opposition is part of a recurring historical cycle. Technological transformations have repeatedly been met with both fascination and anxiety, promise and resistance. AI becomes the latest expression of this pattern, rather than an entirely unprecedented rupture.

Rather than presenting these perspectives as irreconcilable, the artwork suggests they are complementary expressions of the same reality, two sides of a single coin, destined to reappear in different forms as each new technological cycle begins.

22-20 deploys a constellation of vertical forms, at once architecture, organism, and network of conduits. Between its reddish-brown layers, an orange light breaks through: it seems to animate a structure in perpetual recomposition.

Kim Farkas’ practice explores the circulations between rituals, consumer goods, manufacturing techniques, and diasporic narratives. Informed notably by his Peranakan and Singaporean heritage, his work brings together heterogeneous materials and signs—votive papers, domestic objects, urban architecture, or contemporary technologies. His sculptures view identity not as a fixed form, but as an unstable assemblage: shaped by displacement, attachment, memory, and the contexts in which bodies evolve.

In 22-20, the elements intertwine like a living urban landscape, where fragility, power, and transformation overlap.

For years I ground solid iron, trying to free a human figure trapped inside. When I lost one of these sculptures in England, only the dust of grinding remained on my studio floor. The form was gone, but the iron was still there, as powder.

“I’ve Lost the Form.”

I stopped making forms, began writing with that powder, and called myself an Exsculptor.

As a child, I collected iron powder with a magnet, and adults would say, “You’re looking for money.” Here at the Monnaie de Paris, where metal has been made into currency for centuries, iron returns as powder. On a large sheet of unbleached cotton, dampened with water and glue, I wrote without preparing any words.

Questions held inside for years came out as if they had to be expelled from my body, the same impulse as my early declaration:

“I’ve Pooped.”

I wrote in Korean, French, Arabic, English, Swahili and Spanish. When I raised the wet cloth, the powder ran down; some letters remained, others vanished. Layer upon layer, the writing became a landscape, my own form of poetry, calligraphy and painting (詩書畵).

Hung in the courtyard, the cloth will rust in the rain, wind and sunlight of Paris, becoming a carpet of memory where words and images flow together.