In his new chapter of the evolving visual narrative “A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies”, Arijit Bhattacharya explores the political and social entanglements of Gaia's terra-magic and the divine poetic justice that transcends religions, time, space, and dimension. Building on the work of journalist and activist Amtus Stanislaus Kuyili, who documents the incarceration of people on whose bodies plants have grown, the artist proposes further connecting the human and non-human networks of solidarity above and below the soil in a magical realist intervention, when the moral and physical collapse of our current living system becomes unbearable to witness. Previous chapters of the novel include “From Forests We Are And Forests We Will Be” (Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2023) and “The Whispering Sea” (Artlink Dunree, 2024), which can be described as social science fiction envisaging forms of equality and emancipation in the present day.

Arijit's artistic training at the Baroda School, his inspiration from the magic of Saeed Mirza's progressive new wave cinema, and his passion for journalistic research converge in this unique third iteration, generously hosted at the Berlin Programme for Artistic Research by Künstlerhaus Frohnau. Paintings of plant-human mutant bodies and bodies under the care of the herbal dimension, as well as films of the police interrogation of trade unionist Tarulata Ghosh after she grew tuberoses on her body, are accompanied by journalistic reports of struggles for earthly justice in places ranging from Germany and India to Palestine. In this parallel universe, colours reclaim their agency of political expression. The portraits, inspired by Ghosh's story, use stark colours to activate a collective emotional register, freeing it from moral apathy. Hauntedness becomes a space of celebration and liberation.

While animal-human mutant forms are common in various mythologies around the world, plant-human combinations are rare. These mythological creatures, which can be animal or anthropomorphic, often embody the forces of nature and the unknown. They served as explanations for the world, moral guides and symbols of power or chaos long before their meanings were appropriated by Marvel Comics or Disney morality. Examples include the Lóng in ancient China, the sphinx in ancient Egypt, Tiamat in Babylonia, and the Nagas and Garudas in India. The Ciguapa, a Dominican syncretic and anti-colonial protectress of wildlife, may be the closest example of a plant-human mutation. The more widely circulated example in the Western art canon is Daphne’s mutation into a tree to avoid Apollo in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Some beliefs allow for the possibility of rebirth into non-human forms, including plants, based on a person's dominant thoughts and actions in life. In Arijit's narrative, plants openly support social justice by mutating into human forms. This act of solidarity transcends the capacity of the machinery that separates the human body from its surroundings. We should also remember that plants were the first to ‘suffer’ the binomial system of naming species, introduced by the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. This system exemplified the urge to classify, which later underpinned ideologies of race and inequality.

“A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies” bridges the anniversaries of destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by mobs that shaped the current Indian sociopolitical landscape in 1992, the death of the revolutionary figure of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar who wrote the secular Indian constitution and worked for the equality of marginalised communities in India, in 1956; and the murder of Amadeu Antonio, an Angolan Vertragsarbeiter who came to East Germany in the hope of receiving a higher education, by right-wing extremists in Eberswalde in 1990. The current Hindu nationalist Modi regime in India is part of a larger separatist and extremist right-wing movement in our world.

 Aimé Césaire speaks of the possibility of a true humanism that is made to the measure of the world, which the West can never come close to despite mouthing the word too often.[1] The coloniality of power, on the other hand, confirms the 'matrix' of methods for social and political control that persist even after direct colonial rule has ended. Arijit's transdisciplinary, expanded artistic practice seeks to transcend one-dimensional, linear narratives in favour of a wide-eyed vision of the world. A deep criticism of monocultural linearity, based on his experiences in India and Germany, has shaped his understanding of anti-colonial resistance in the post-independence era. 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.

Arijit takes the world and its labour seriously, as he does not take life on Earth for granted. For him, separatism starts with disconnecting the human body from its core soil material and other spheres of life. It continues with the mediation of human self-sovereignty in the hands of racial capitalist machinery, the incarceration of people fighting for the future of society, and the polarisation of communities using race constructs and religious ideologies. All of these are part of the same diagnosis of a toxic system that is collapsing earthly life as we know it. The design of canons, categories and borders in art-historical thinking; media-oriented art education; and erasure-based approaches that feed on extraction rather than relationality in the contemporary art system are reflections of that macro mechanism. This is probably why Arijit refuses to limit his artistic thinking to one medium or another, preferring instead to create an immersive environment of challenging, transgenerational formal conversations (between forms, and also between himself and his ancestral and modern sources of formal knowledge), woven together to form a larger narrative.

In a videotaped interview, film director and writer Saeed Mirza discusses the potential of stories to change the nature of film-making, particularly in the aftermath of the violence sparked by the destruction of the Babri Mosque. He asks, "What are the fears, the paranoia and the nightmares?" What dreams and aspirations can change things collectively? How do you create an object of hate? How do you create an object of attack and then work towards it?”[2] It is eye-opening to consider Mirza’s views on the responsibility of storytelling alongside Donna Haraway’s concept of 'storying otherwise', which is often quoted in sanitised forms in the contemporary art field's approach to storytelling. “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds and what worlds make stories.” [3]Indeed, it matters what stories we use to tell other stories, and which questions we choose to ask. In order to activate the potential of storytelling as a method and space to rewrite histories beyond colonial archives, we must address the root of fear, paranoia and nightmares.

That is why the investigative journalism in “A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies”, which covers the stories of coloniality, injustice and the various struggles of different peoples in Germany, India and Palestine, is crucial. This work is made possible thanks to the contributions of Rimil Umul Collective, Shubhangi Derhgawen, Faheem Hemboum, Amtus Stanislaus Kuyil and Jad Salfiti. The complicity of the mainstream media in refusing or obstructing the truth today has forced people to use their own limited means to tell their stories of erasure. These stories must not be abstracted, made invisible, erased or dismissed as beyond the remit of contemporary art. Rather, these are the stories through which art can contribute to building a humanism that is made to the measure of the world in close touch with more-than-human. This is one of the dreams and aspirations that can bring about collective change. And here we are in Berlin, at a particular moment in time when the city's arts infrastructure is being dismantled by right-wing monoculturalism, and when voices that want to stay close to the truth are systematically silenced. We are holding a breathing space for each other, to make 'A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies' happen, and to take one small step closer to that aspiration.

 

[1] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 (Re-print)

[2]Saeed Mirza in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOCj8TqKLGQ, Accessed on 28th November 2025.

[3] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 12.

Curation and text by 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.

Funded by Künstlerhof Frohnau hosted by the Berlin Artistic Research Program