6.12.2025-18.1.2026
Künstlerhof Frohnau hosted by the Berlin Artistic Research Program: Uferstrasse 13, 13357 Berlin.
Opening: Saturday, Dec 6, 7pm
Opening hours: Fri to Sun 12 to 7 pm and by appointment

A project of Künstlerhof Frohnau, with contributions by Rimil Umul Collective, Shubhangi Derhgawen, Faheem Hemboum, Amtus Stanislaus Kuyil, and Jad Salfiti. Curated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu.

A Handful of Truth in a Mouthful of Lies presents murals, painting, drawings, video and a newly produced publication created during Arijit Bhattacharyya’s artist residency at Künstlerhof Frohnau. The residency and the publication are part of the Ruckhaberle Award, granted to the artist in 2024 and awarded in cooperation with the Berlin Reinickendorf Municipality.

Arijit Bhattacharya’s new chapter in his evolving novel “A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies” is grounded in his firm belief in a political and social entanglement of Gaia’s terra magic and a supra-religious divine poetic justice operating across multiple levels of time, space and dimension. Following the work of journalist and activist Amtus Stanislaus Kuyili, who documents the incarceration of people on whose bodies plants have grown, the artist proposes to further connect human and more than human networks of solidarity above and below soil in a magical realist intervention at a moment when the moral and physical collapse of our current living system becomes unbearable to witness.

Arijit’s artistic grounding in the Baroda School, his inspiration from the magic of the social realist cinema of Saeed Mirza, and his zeal for journalistic research come together in this special first iteration, generously hosted by the Berlin Program Künstlerische Forschung on behalf of Künstlerhof Frohnau. The paintings of plant mutant dissident bodies, or dissident bodies under the care of the herbal dimension, and an analogue shot film on the police interrogation of trade unionist Tarulata Ghosh and her friends, overtaken after growing tuberose on her body, are accompanied by journalistic reports of struggles for earthly justice from Germany, India, Palestine and beyond.

“A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies” opens on 6 December, bridging the anniversaries of the destruction of the historic Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, the death of the revolutionary figure Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar who wrote the secular Indian constitution, and the death of Amadeo Antonio, an Angolan Gastarbeiter. The current Hindu nationalist Modi regime in India becomes part of the larger separatist and extremist right wing picture of our world. Arijit’s transdisciplinary expanded artistic practice seeks to transcend a one handed linear narrative toward a wide eyed horizon. From this long term perspective, his artistic and humanistic desire is to understand how the collective can generate deep traditions of resistance and dark nightmares of fascism simultaneously.
Övül Ö. Durmusoglu

The exhibition was developed in collaboration with Pedro Jośe D’Agosto, Samriddhi Banerjee, Joachim Bartsch, Kaya Behkalam, Nilanjan Bhattacharya, Swagata Bhattacharyya, Suparna Bhattacharjee, Belia Zanna Geetha Brückner, Achyut Kumar Chatterjee, Zuriñe Mariño Ciruelo, Soma Dasgupta, Santanu Dey. Rike Frank, Soumik Ghosh, Timo Grimberg, Moritz Grünke, Shibayan Halder, Mina Mohseni, Ratul Nandi, Narendran Nair, Bipul Roy, Sasanka Roohdar, and Prateek Vijan.