Tiergarten, Berlin
Amrita Dhillon
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
Tanya LeightonTanya Leighton is pleased to present In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based Indian artist Amrita Dhillon. Working across materials such as velvet, suede, and canvas, Dhillon creates paintings that draw on cinematic imaginings of India — spanning the visual language of mid-century Indian cinema and the Orientalist fantasies of early twentieth-century Western film — to explore how women have been shaped and constrained by systems of image-making. Her figures often appear in states of partial presence: blurred, cropped, turned away. Using slow, shimmering surfaces that resist clarity, Dhillon transforms moments of cinematic stillness into sites of tension and refusal. What emerges is a quiet but insistent challenge to how femininity has been aestheticised, consumed, and historicised. Amrita Dhillon (born in New Delhi) lives and works in Berlin. She studied history at Bard College in New York and Berlin, followed by fine arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Thilo Heinzmann. Dhillon presented her first duo exhibition, ‘Things Fall Apart’, at the Dorothea Konwiarz Stiftung in Berlin, and her work was the subject of a public presentation at Passage, Berlin, both in 2024. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Buero Wolff Jordan, Berlin; Kunstverein Ulm; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; Werkhalle Wiesenburg, Berlin; and Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin.