Lost and Found
‘What kind of life does a story contain in the absence of its teller? Does it cease to exist?’ asks Najrin Islam in the beginning of her essay for the winter issue of ArtReview Asia on the work of Soumya Sankar Bose. When Bose was nine years old, in 1969, his mother went missing after leaving their home for a walk. She returned three years later, with no memory of what had happened to her. Bose’s family life has been defined by this blank. Islam writes about his latest and ongoing project, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (2020–), in which the artist attempts to tell his mother’s story, blanks and all. Islam describes how ‘the artist delves into his family history, and supplements oral testimonies from family members with archival documents such as police records and images of children who went missing during the 1970s. The artist’s drive to collect information is premised on both a response to and fear of loss. Loss, in fact, becomes a current that charges the exhibition through both recall and repair.’
How to tell the story of erasure? Bose’s work fuses digital technologies and physical archival materials, as well as interviews with his family members. The artist keeps a diary in which he writes down hypothetical thoughts in the voice of his grandfather, which were then translated to a VR film. Fact and fiction, research and personal stories intermingle in this project, which has been shown at Experimenter in Mumbai and Kolkata, as well as the photography festival Les Rencontres d’Arles 2023. Bose is currently working on the second chapter of the project, which will deal with the same story, this time through his mother’s perspective.
