July 17, 2026

Arijit Bhattacharyya: Who Gave Us the Name?

Yul Cho, Ifra Shariq, Lois Ding & Ruoxi Gao in Conversations with Arijit Bhattacharyya

We caught up with Arijit Bhattacharyya during his 2026 summer residency at IASPIS in Stockholm. Arijit is an artist and cultural practitioner working across various mediums, often in collaboration with artists, activists and journalists, and splits his time between India, Germany, and Mexico. While MAAPS primarily focuses on art practitioners based in Sweden, we are also interested in conversations and exchanges that shape the landscape of the Swedish art scene – which is exactly why we wanted to sit down with him at his IASPIS studio. 

Almost immediately, he turned the tables, asking us what we meant by “Asia” and how we approached the idea of mapping. For us, mapping has never been about cartographic certainty, but rather an intentional countermove against the colonial logic of borders and territorial possession. Asia, after all, has long been framed through Western projections. In Sweden, that framing often collapses into a single, monolithic narrative. We want to fracture that with MAAPS, to bring into view the multiplicities that have been erased.

When we told him this, he reached for a name, Okakura Tenshin, whose ideas about Asia still resonate, and whose legacy reveals just how tangled the act of naming Asia really is. Here’s why he starts there.
 

ARIJIT: It’s quite interesting what you were saying about Asia. That’s why I generally think of Japan first in this context. Okakura Tenshin was actually quite a controversial figure. He was a Japanese art historian and political philosopher who worked in the United States and played a key role in building the Asian art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

He was invited to India by Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate. They had many discussions, and Tenshin used the phrase “Asia is one.” That idea later got twisted by Japanese nationalism during the Second World War, and also shaped how Europe viewed the Orient. The notion of Asia itself came much later – it’s always been more about the Orient and the Occident than anything else. So Asia has always been a political challenge, and it still is today. That’s why I’m interested in what I was asking you – how do we look at maps?

Mapping and cartography interests me because even today, the Occident refuses to recognize Central Asia or West Asia as distinct – it’s all just the “Middle East.” Then you have the “Indo-Pacific” conversation. When Trump recently removed “Indo” from the Pacific region, it made me wonder: why does that happen? Why are certain expressions suddenly removed? I’m interested in language, in how we name things. 

When you speak of mapping Asia or mapping cultural practices – you say it’s multi-layered. I would propose that Asia is fluid. Asia doesn’t belong to Asians; it exists through practices that remind the world what the rest of them are. Because I don’t think any of us – Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Mongolians, Afghans, Filipinos, Thai, Cambodian – would define ourselves this way. We never called ourselves Asians. Who gave us the name? And why do we accept it?

This is what interests me. This is what I do, what I look at. I would say that I’m not per se an artist – I am not represented by a gallery yet. I see myself more as a cultural practitioner – and more honestly, as a detective. I collaborate with artists, activists, journalists and others, and build from there.

YUL: I noticed you work across different forms and mediums. Is that a deliberate choice, or does it come naturally? 

ARIJIT: I think I like a lot of different food. I’m a big foodie – I love eating multiple things at the same time. So if I’m not wearing the same clothes every day, or eating the same food every day, why should I be doing the same thing? Some people dive deeper into one thing; I dive deeper into a lot of things at the same time without losing interest. If something works, I go with it. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

That’s why I work with a lot of people. I don’t have many skills. I’m clumsy as fuck – and I think that’s the best thing I have. Because I can’t do a lot of things myself, I go out looking for people who can. I do not believe in the idea of the artist as a genius or master maker. That’s how I get to say what I want to say, the way I want to say it. How do I bring in more things, more people, more ways of doing things? That’s why I work this way. 

YUL: What made you come to this residency?

ARIJIT: I was nominated by Amila Puzic, the curator of the Röda Sten Konsthall. We worked on a project together in 2022 and stayed in touch. She’s an amazing friend.

The project was a larger project with three artists: Hillside Projects, Julia Schuster – an amazing Austrian artist and ceramicist – and me. The show was called dhak dhak ho-hum ah eekff iii ie, an onomatopoeic name for a vulture chewing bones. Hillside Projects looked at the disappearance of 93% of India’s vulture population. Julia explored belly flora and body grounding. My project was called My Screams Are Silent in Your Dreams – I was having conversations about the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in India and reached out to Safoora Zargar. We talked a lot about dreams.

My part of the exhibition started with floor mappings, but hung as barricades. They were huge, about 5 by 3.5 meters each, five panels in total. On one side, you’d see limbs crossing with a banner that read “We, the People,” the first word of the Indian Constitution’s preamble. On the other side, you’d see police officers carrying a dead protester, Muslim women demonstrating, and book burnings in the background. 

There was also an uncut video conversation between Safoora and me. Just audio, because I wanted to give her space to speak. I was also struck by a comment Modi made, saying protesters could be identified by their clothes. I’ve worked with clothing for over a decade – fabric, how it transforms, how it carries multiple personas – so I designed a protest dress for Safoora. And there was an animated video I collaborated on with Lea Maria Wittich and Swagata Bhattacharyya.

The whole show was a collaboration with four or five other people. It was like a village making the work together. That’s how I  like to work. I don’t claim sole authority. But this is something that I don’t want to highlight – how we divide the monetary system in the given structures of art practice, where the authorship is quite convoluted. The work was done in collaboration with Binita Limbani, Owanka, Bhattacharjee, Suchandra Kundu, Chapola Biswas, Sabita Das, Maytrayee Halder, Soumik Ghosh, Shibyan Halder, Santanu Dey, Suvankar Halder, Akhil Jana, Prnay Moule, Nilima Parda, Janardan Jana, Kabita Jana, Manaka Jana, Chandrakanta Jana, Dulu Parda, Rita Jana, Susama Kar, Kalipada Kar, Lakshmi Kar and Biswanath Mallick, Pintu Halder, Prasun Moule, Kunal Pramanik, Braja Sankar Gorai and Sanat Rupray. 

YUL: When you exhibit work like this in Sweden, do you find yourself editing or censoring yourself? Do you think about what the audience knows? 

ARIJIT: No. I just put it out there. I received really bad press for the show. If I am not wrong, a Swedish critic in a popular Gothenburg newspaper didn’t understand the work. He wrote that the video could have been edited better. The interview video between Safoora and me – you don’t see either of us, you just hear the whole conversation. There was also an animated video of fireflies above water. He didn’t get it. And that’s okay.

I don’t seek validation that way. Even if I’m not showing somewhere down the line – if I open a grocery store in India or somewhere else in five years – I’ll still make art, and it will still be valid. I don’t need to edit myself. I don’t need to censor myself for anyone. 

That’s how I am. I sometimes feel like I’m given only one life – not in a narrow sense, but in the way Kabir, the 14th-century mystic, would say. When I first heard his words as a teenager, I was obsessed. He wrote a doha, which later became a song. He said: “I carried this pitcher on my head for so long, thinking it would quench my thirst. Until I realized the pitcher was my burden. I was supposed to seek water, not carry the pitcher.” That still helps me – to go back and ask why I’m doing what I’m doing.  

YUL: We touched on this earlier – the moment you step out of your country, you get labeled. Especially in the West, it’s always “Asian artist” or “Indian artist.” How do you relate to that, working internationally? 

ARIJIT: I’m not an Indian artist. I’m an artist. Would they ever call a Belgian artist living in Mexico only a “Belgian artist?” No. Then why would they call me an “Indian artist?” You can write about me as an Indian artist living in Germany – that’s your choice, not mine. I will always be an artist.

Would they call an engineer an “Indian engineer” or a “Japanese engineer?” No. They’d just call them an engineer. The thing is, that’s how they want to culturally point us. It allows their reading to happen in a certain way. That’s why you see certain practices getting highlighted, certain practices getting easier access to museums.

So, are you playing with the Western canon? Are you playing with your own country’s canon? Or are you interested in art history in general? What’s stopping me from looking at an artist from Brazil and learning from them? It’s not about appropriation – it’s about understanding. If we’re still thinking in these categories, we’re fucked. Absolutely fucked. 

IFRA: It’s similar to how the West categorizes non-Western artists. One of the motivations to come up with MAAPS was because in Sweden, many Asian art practices exist in parallel, but they never really meet since they’re scattered across different categories. 

YUL: And many POC artists face this dilemma – either they get tokenized for their culture, labeled as a “Korean artist” or “Indian artist,” or they feel they have to whitewash themselves to be taken seriously. A lot of practitioners talk about how impossible it feels to navigate. 

ARIJIT: I think this is quite important. I would also say that the West does not exist. There is nothing called “West” – even in the cultural argument, when people insist it exists, I absolutely disagree. Where is it? To whom do you think you are “the rest?” It’s like an orange – you want to find “West” inside an orange. That’s how geopolitics operates. The moment you construct something, you want it to be protected. First you build it, then you establish hegemony, then you operate through it. So if we want our own liberation, we should stop thinking in terms of “the West.” It doesn’t exist. And I think that should be our starting point. You’re in Sweden; you’re not in the West. So in that way, it operates quite interestingly.

Arijit’s rejection of “the West” as a category is grounded in something concrete; it shapes how he reads the specific place he’s in. In Sweden, he points to the Spotify founder investing in AI weapons, public cultural institutions being quietly moved or sold off, and asks who benefits. For him, these are visible, material signs of how power operates. Who gets to decide what stays, what moves, and who is pushed out? Sweden, like anywhere else, is not neutral, and that’s what he’s paying attention to. His current practice, though, is based elsewhere, across projects in Germany, Indonesia, and India. 

YUL: So what are you working on right now? 

ARIJIT: I’m working on 3–4 different projects right now. One is a collaboration with Binita Limbani and Arshil Limbani – a piece made entirely of hair, with moving leaves, titled Grows in Body and Bark Returns to Soil, Yet the Factory Keeps Its Canopy. It’ll be in Berlin for a show called The Shape of Us at Kunstpunkt Berlin, curated by Keumhwa Kim, looking at artists imagining posthuman mutation. 

Then there’s the Pontianak Biennale in Indonesia. I’m looking at the 1965–66 policide, when the government killed around 3 million communists. I’m building a traditional floating structure called a bagan on the Kapuas River that detects portals inside the river because I am claiming that the river Mechi, on the border of India and Nepal and the Kapuas River, where Pontianak as a city is situated – and in these two rivers, different letters are coming out from people who disappeared during the Naxalbari Movement and the anti-communist policide in Indonesia. Also in India, the Naxalite Movement was an absolutely important peasant movement of the far-left guerrillas, where thousands of students were killed and indigenous people who supported this form of uprising that was actually wanting the tea workers to gain more independence and also wanted a much more horizontal government. And which failed, of course, because of the cruelty of the Indian government. So I’m saying that they tried to communicate with each other over time through various natural entities such as the rivers in this case. Dispossessed people communicating with each other beyond geographical borders. So the portal finder that is there in the river is trying to find these moments of communication. But around the portal finder, there will be some drawings from the actual archive of perpetrators – army personnel or police personnel who were involved in killing or harming people. These drawings will melt and disappear over the course of the Biennale.

Then in India, I am a part of the Bengal Biennale curated by Chanderhaat and Ritika Biswas in my home region, where I’m doing a project called How to Detain a Forest. I’m writing a play and building an installation – where students in a university start growing plants on their bodies,  eventually becoming trees. The government comes in to remove them, and these plants and people who are now one are killed. The work exists as a press conference around that moment. It’ll be shown in Shantiniketan and Kolkata. 

This is the third project I’m doing at this point. I’m also working on a larger self-portrait project for KW in Berlin, which I have a showing for later this year. I’m looking into Germany’s involvement in arms manufacturing, specifically recent developments and collaborations between the German and Indian governments to produce arms. Germany has also started pushing for new army recruitment, introducing new policies and allocating significant funding for public advertisements. And for the last three years, I’ve been writing a novel that unfolds through different exhibition chapters. How to Detain a Forest is one of them – it’s actually an offshoot of a character from the novel. The previous chapter was called A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies, which was shown in Berlin, curated by the new director of Index, Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu. 

These projects are all part of a larger novel. It’s set in a moment when plants decide they’ve had enough – they start growing on human bodies and slowly taking over. But they’re partly plant, partly human too.

YUL: Why are you drawn to plants? Do you think they offer something beyond a human perspective? 

ARIJIT: I think they’re interesting organisms, but also the most Marxist thing you can find. They produce their own food, shelter, clothing in some ways. The entire plant kingdom has its own forms of collaboration, disagreement, even violence – but they’ve figured it out. We struggle with the simplest things. It’s a class war between plants, animals, and us. We are animals, but we refuse to see ourselves that way. So we’re in a class war with plants and the rest of the world. That’s why I’m drawn to them. 

The conversation turned to Carl Linnaeus – inescapable in Sweden, yet his racial classifications nowhere discussed. Arijit pointed to the absurdity of Homo sapiens – “intelligent man” – as if we’re all men, as if we’re all intelligent. He noted the seedless fruits engineered for dependency, and the eugenics that Sweden prefers to forget. Yul brought up how certain stories don’t travel beyond borders, how Sweden constructs its own myth. Ifra followed up – some stories simply don’t travel. The anti-CAA protests in India, for instance. People here have no idea they even happened. And when you make art about it, a critic’s response is that it’s too long. 

Arijit continued, unpacking the trap of identity categories, the work of his last show, and his own sense of responsibility. 

ARIJIT: I think there’s also a flip side to this anti-racist argument – it’s led to a larger essentialist argument, which we’re all dealing with now. These essential notions of who we are, what we are, rather than what we can be. I find it interesting how these things are controlled – who says what, what gets said. In this context, it helps me to remember why I do what I do.

There are a lot of artists working around these ideas, but it’s not about being “one of” something – it’s a larger engagement. It’s not just about doing something about the anti-CAA protests, but understanding what else is going on. In my last show, A Handful of Truths in a Mouthful of Lies, I collaborated with journalists. A British-Palestinian journalist, Jad Salfiti, talked about how poetry and journalism have been obliterated in Gaza – how journalists use words like “alleged” for Palestinians, but “this is what happened” for Israel. Then there was Faheem Hemboum, a Black Muslim journalist looking at the Black Muslim experience in Berlin and Germany’s police infrastructure. And I worked with Shubhangi Derhgawen and Rimil Umul Collective on the destruction of the central Indian forests, including the Hasdeo Forest and how detention is used there to muzzle dissent.

The whole show was about detention. Who gets to detain? Detention is different from arrest. Arrest requires a First Information Report – you take someone and put them in a secure place. Detention can happen arbitrarily. Tomorrow they could say anyone who puts three cubes of sugar in tea will be detained, because diabetes is a pressure on national health infrastructure, so we need preventive care. Detention works in a grey zone. So it’s not just about being “one of” something. It’s about constantly building up and letting stories come out. 

IFRA: Do you feel a responsibility to bring out these stories? 

ARIJIT: I am a citizen. I want to act as a responsible citizen. If that means telling stories, I will. If that means jumping from a building, I would. What’s happened in the last few years is that we’ve forgotten we are humans first – we have responsibility towards each other. And we are citizens. Maybe not citizens of Sweden, but we are citizens living in Sweden. We are citizens of this world. My responsibility comes from there. I use my artistic practice as a tool for citizens’ argument, and to deconstruct the notion of the state. Whose state are we talking about? It goes hand in hand with nationalism and xenophobia.