Soumya Sankar Bose’s first international exhibition at the Delfina Foundation, Braiding dusk and dawn, focuses on historically overlooked, excluded and forgotten events. Using photography, film and virtual reality, the show pivots around post-Partition Bengal and the reality of living with newly created boundaries and civil unrest and displacement. Informed by his family’s experiences, Bose captures not just the truth, but memories that face the threat of being erased.

Bose stresses the importance of visual documentation to combat his chronophobia, the fear of passing time. He describes it as an anxiety around “losing time” and sees his work as an “alternative archive”. He is drawn to certain periods of Bengal’s history, discussing the 1950s as tumultuous years of which only an oral archive exists. He also works with people who remember what happened in the 1979 Marichjhapi massacre, where an undocumented number of Dalit refugees lost their lives in the Sundarbans, a forested mangrove area at the mouth of the Ganges. These recollections are woven into the photographs and films featured in this exhibition and become enmeshed with his personal story. The result is a disorientating overlay of memories brought together to accomplish the documentation of multiple narratives in one frame.

The core of the exhibition is Bose’s interconnected films, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (2020) and a newly commissioned three-channel work, Things We Lost Last Night (2024) that dwells on the three-year disappearance of his mother in 1969, which, to this day, remains a mystery. Bose, who is represented by Experimenter Gallery, spoke to STIR about the bewildering story behind these works and his choice of medium.

Rhea Mathur: Can you tell us more about this exhibition and its focus?

Soumya Sankar Bose: During the pandemic, I was thinking about working on the incident of my mother's disappearance when she was nine. Although the incident happened almost 50 years ago, my family members never discussed it. My grandmother is the only person who has a vivid memory of the events that happened at that time. Hearing from her the details of the incident that happened 50 years back, I started visiting my relatives who could give me their accounts and perspectives of the event. Since my grandfather passed away before his daughter returned, my mother never saw him again.

The photographs in the exhibition project the locations my grandfather visited in search of his lost daughter. The two films deal with the subject from two different perspectives, the first one, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, the VR film is based on my grandfather's journey in search of his missing daughter. The second one is a three-channel film called Things We Lost Last Night, which deals with my mother’s perspective of those two years of her disappearance.

Rhea: Talk to us about the journey of creating a 360-degree virtual reality film. Why was an experimentation of medium necessary for you?

Soumya: Initially, it was difficult because there was no reference on how to make the film. So, before starting the final shooting, we went through a trial and error process multiple times, particularly my team—cinematographer Kenneth Cyrus, editor Barnali Bose, sound designer Dibakar Saha and assistant director Souvik Kar Mahapatra—helped me a lot in this process to figure out the technical difficulties. I am always keen on learning new things and implementing them through my work.

The 360-degree VR medium was something that I thought would be appropriate for this story as I wanted my audience to have an immersive experience. The viewers will watch the film solo and take part in the journey themselves in the space I have created. It’ll feel like a dream where sometimes they might feel a little claustrophobic while watching it and that is, to some extent, intentional on my part. This film as well as the new three-channel film will make them approach the story from different perspectives.

Rhea: Do you think the two mediums complement each other?

Soumya: I think we used not two, but multiple mediums in this project—a VR 360-degree film, a three-channel film and then photography prints. Using parallel mediums is part of my practice. For my previous works, Let's Sing an Old Song or Where the Birds Never Sing, I focused on producing visual books and films too. Now, for this project, I decided to make the two films. I do not want to restrict a story within one single framework or boundary. Rather, from my perspective, if the story is told through different interconnected mediums, the viewers will enjoy the immersive experience of multiple layers of the story.

Rhea: How do you think time impacts your work?

Soumya: With time and age, our memories and perspectives change because our surroundings change. When the surroundings change, our way of looking at things also changes.

For me, my work is a way to document how I am growing older. It is always interesting for me to go back to my 20s and look at the way I captured memories back then. I know that when I am in my 40s, everything I capture now will be just as interesting to reflect on. This becomes a process of learning and unlearning for me and my art.

Since I deal with visual memories that represent history, time is also particularly relevant for those whom I am collaborating with. Whether it is my grandmother, my friends, colleagues or the survivors of the Marichjhapi and everyone I have worked with. It is always interesting to see how we documented these memories and what that brought to everyone individually.

Rhea: Do you see your work as personal? How do you find it when people interact with subjects close to your heart?

Soumya: I can agree with you that the memory we are talking about is personal but my work is a hybrid, where they are not all completely personal. For example: my first work, the 360-degree VR, is about my grandfather but that is a person I have never seen or met. I do not have any personal attachment to him. I was born over 20 years after his death so there is no bond between us, making him almost a fictional character in my film.

To shape this character, I have been taking references from oral archives such as interviewing my grandmother and my neighbours and looking at newspaper articles from that time. Since he never left me a note or diary with his thoughts, sometimes I see my work as creating a diary for him, journaling what could be his thoughts in my work and designing something that he could have left for me to read. It is creating an archive for someone who perhaps never got the opportunity to do it themselves.

Rhea: How do you see a global audience interacting with your work?

Soumya: An important year in my work is 1969. A year which is relevant and important not just to me but to global history. This was a time when the USA was planning its moon landing, the Communist movement had already started and in India, at that time, the Naxalite movement had begun. So, this was a time when there was a global revolution and that upheaval everywhere caused people to go missing.

In my three-channel film, the central focus seems to be on my mother’s disappearance, but it is also about other people. It is about everyone whose years went undocumented or never saw someone they loved again. Her return also often makes me think about the people who never returned, making that an important part of my work and this film.

I believe that my work transcends the boundaries of a personal piece and I hope it represents a larger human history. Now that I am working on documenting these memories of the 1950s to 1970s in 2024, I think I bring a nuanced, global perspective to them. My work for that reason, is a global call to document and create archives of past and present trauma. It is a call to remember the people who went missing, think about their stories and document them. It is a call to look at our past and history as something that is still in our power to mould.