28 May 2024
This spring, Delfina Foundation presents the first international solo exhibition by its former resident Soumya Sankar Bose, titled Braiding Dusk and Dawn. In this conversation Soumya and the show’s curator Erin Li discuss the incident that lies at the heart of the show, why the artist felt compelled to make this body of work around it, and his process and choices in producing and presenting it.
Erin Li (Curator): This project began with an incident that happened to your mum when she was nine years old. Could you tell us what happened?
Soumya Sankar Bose (Artist): So this was in 1969, towards the end of that year. My mum went to a sweet shop to buy an offering for the family shrine, and did not return for a few years — I always say ‘a few years’, because nobody exactly knows how many years it was. My grandma would sometimes say it was two years, sometimes three years, sometimes two and a half. My grandfather was searching for everywhere my mum during that time, looking everywhere he could think of — and then he died in 1971 before her return.
For me a key part of all this is the fact that my mum and her father never saw each other again. Almost fifty years later I developed two parallel stories about the same incident: one is a 360° VR film, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (2023), where I tried to imagine what my grandfather went through while he was looking for my mum, what the whole family went through. And the second, Things We Lost Last Night (2024), is about my mum’s journey during those years, and is a film she and I developed together. A Discreet Exit Through Darkness was developed with my grandma, because my grandfather died fifty years ago.
Erin: I know this project has been four years in the making. How did you first conceptualise it? Did you start out with the structure of two chapters from different people’s perspectives in mind?
Soumya: Not initially, no. I began the work during COVID, in early 2020, when most of our family members were staying together for months at a time. I’d actually known about the incident for many years, having learned about it from my grandma and my mum, but we didn’t discuss it much. When I began my art practice twelve years ago, I didn’t think of myself as mature enough to deal with the subject. I never had the confidence. But all our family members contracted COVID, and my grandma was in hospital for almost six weeks — some of my family even died. In all of my projects, the main figure tends to also be a collaborator throughout the development and production of the work. And I suddenly had the thought that if I don’t start this project now, maybe it will be too late, because I wanted to develop it with my grandma — she is the only person in the family who still remembers the incident. My mum was only nine years old at the time, so remembers little — but another reason she doesn’t remember much of what happened is that she has prosopagnosia (face blindness).
So I started interviewing my grandma, and then gradually other relatives, friends, neighbours. I realised that because the incident was more than fifty years ago people have forgotten most of it, but interestingly have also started adding their own perspectives. So the incident was becoming a story, with folktales and religious beliefs also woven through.
For instance, when I went back to where my mum grew up I saw the same bael tree is still there. Local people worship the tree, and it keeps coming back into the story — people say there is a ghost living within it, a chief demon. It’s called Bramhadaitya in Bengali.
Brahmadaitya is interesting because it is an upper caste demon. If an upper caste person in the family dies and becomes a ghost, we call it Bramhadaitya. So it’s also about how people want this story to be told, and all the parallel ideas and histories connected with the story, which are often missing in our known history from this subcontinent. This is why I began digging deeper into this particular moment in time — not only focusing on what happened in my family, but also on other people who went missing around the same time.
Erin: You said you didn’t envision it as a two-part project from the beginning — did you gradually realise as you made the 360° VR film A Discreet Exit Through Darkness that you wanted another film to complement it?
Soumya: Initially I wanted to create a photography project. I started visiting the places my grandfather went to look for my mum and interviewing my maternal grandmother’s brother, as well as some of their neighbours. But when I started doing the interviews, I slowly began to realise there are so many things I cannot portray through the photographs alone.
That was when I thought about making these films, because many other things were happening during the late 60s and 70s in Midnapore, and those other memories were missing, somehow. So I began transcribing the interviews, and then started writing the script. I go with the flow all the time, in all of my processes. I don’t think about what I want to do beforehand. I just develop what I feel like developing. The VR film and the three-channel film both came about in this way.
After some time I realised that I wanted to construct a diary from my grandfather’s perspective. So with the stories I’d heard, and the photographs he’d taken, I started writing the notes for it. Then I realised I wanted to develop a 360° VR film so that people can feel they are inside the house, reading the diary, and experience it in an immersive way. The original house was demolished by the neighbours because they thought it was cursed — a few other incidents happened there before my grandfather lived there, which are mentioned in the film — so we had to find another that was similar.
The idea of the second chapter, the three-channel film Things We Lost Last Night, occurred when my mum began completing her unfinished diary. We didn’t want to discuss what happened or what did not happen. That’s not the focus of the work. It’s rather about how you carry something in your head, and how you react to your memories. That applies to both of the works. It’s about how memories actually help us to become who we are. A Discreet Exit Through Darkness is quite claustrophobic, set within a house. Whereas I started developing Things We Lost Last Night while my mum was writing, and it is more about a journey, about moving around. So in the film the protagonist keeps coming back to her room and rereading her own notes.
Erin: Why did you think three-channel video would be the most suitable medium for this second chapter?
Soumya: I wanted it to be more free than the previous film, for it to be something different. The family’s memory of the incident and my mum’s memory of it are totally different. For one thing we don’t see any trauma in the second film. It might be there, but we don’t see it — my mum says the experience helped her to see the world. I don’t know how exactly, maybe it’s just blocked in her memory, but she does not carry the trauma of the incident with her. But she does remember another incident where her father was a little violent towards her sister. For me the second chapter has a different atmosphere from A Discreet Exit Through Darkness, so it needed a different visual representation.
Erin: Maybe the three-channel medium is also a way for you to open it up to the audience, because your mum and other family members all see the story in different lights, and you want the audience to have their own interpretation.
Soumya: Yeah, when they compare the two perspectives they will have their own interpretation of the story. Again the films are not only about my mum or my grandfather, but also about the leftist movement, and the broader violence in India and Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) at that time, whether political or religious. For instance, during my research for the film, I collected police records of other people who had gone missing at around the same time, from the same area. These are some things we consider when we try to understand what might or might not have happened. Many things in my work, as I always say, may not have happened. But it’s also interesting to understand how we imagine the past — how far we can push ourselves, in 2024, to understand what happened in 1969.
Erin: I also know that you sought out newspapers from the time to read the reports about in India in that period — both at the British Library during your residency at Delfina Foundation in 2022, and back home in West Bengal, India. In both films, you braided together personal memories from your family members, these archival materials, and your own imagination. Could you elaborate on this process of collating all these elements and weaving them together?
Soumya: I wrote most of the script for the second film when I was in residence at Delfina Foundation, and then reframed it a little when I came back to Kolkata. I started with my mum’s unfinished diary and then dug up parallel incidents from the same year — I had already found out about some of these in local archives of Indian newspapers, but I also wanted to see how the Western world perceived these incidents, including the communist movement and the Bangladesh Liberation War. I read so many newspapers of that moment stating that Bangladesh was going to lose its independence struggle, which of course did not happen — so we can see both then and now how newspapers play mind games with us with their predictions. Now of course we know the outcome of those conflicts, but it’s also interesting to see and understand how confidently they were declaring things that turned out to be wrong — it was intriguing to read the British, American and Russian newspapers covering the Cold War during the same period for this reason too.
Other kinds of research ran in parallel with this, particularly oral histories — when my grandfather went to the police station to report my mum’s disappearance, the police replied ‘you have no idea what is happening in the country now. All these things are happening and you are coming here for one girl? There are many cases of people missing.’ And it’s true — many people in their twenties, who supported the communist movement in India during this period, died. The government and the police are responsible for those deaths. So it’s quite interesting that my grandmother remembered this detail of the police’s response to my grandfather, and to think about this in connection to those broader histories surrounding the incident itself.
Then I also collated police records from local NGOs about other people who went missing in Midnapore. I even interviewed some of the survivors who had gone missing then. All these processes helped me develop the script.
Erin: This strategy of blending fiction and fact has been an important element throughout your photography practice, and now your new video works. In the photo installation people will see scenes you’ve constructed to reflect the inner world of those experiencing the incident. Could you talk a little bit about this strategy? Is it also an act of protection for your family members? Or do you think of it more as aesthetic and conceptual strategies to deal with intense emotions — to find hope and imagine different kinds of worlds?
Soumya: All my projects are interconnected. They are fictional and also biographical, and always have been, right from my first book about Jatra, a folk theatre form. My uncle and my granduncle acted in this particular theatre form until it slowly vanished due to the rise of TV and the internet. So I started documenting other people who also acted in this type of theatre too — I always wanted to keep records of our own family history for future, because we never had it. So we develop our own archive, an alternative archive. As ever, some aspects are fictional, and are prompts for future generations to start thinking about certain issues. This hybrid nature is true of the new work, as well as of The Full Moon on a Dark Night (2015-), and Where the Birds Never Sing (2017-2020).
So yes, fiction is always a part of my work. I started collaborating with actors to play certain characters — telling particular parts of a personal story while also hiding other parts, in order to protect people. I think storytelling is always like this — we tell some things and we hide some things. All my works are quite political, and I don’t want my friends, relatives, neighbours, or collaborators to be affected. That’s why in Full Moon on a Dark Night, most of the images are very dark, or sometimes use a costume or a mask to hide someone’s identity, but not their expression. A similar strategy is also applied to this story. You don’t actually see my mum in any of the photographs or the films — you can feel her instead, because it’s not only my family’s story, it’s many other people’s stories, all of which are undocumented and therefore missing from history. That’s why I feel I’m building an alternative archive for the future. History for me is a fiction, it exists in the mind. And this is true of not only social history, but also of personal history. It only comes back as a dream. It is all our imagination, and how we want to revisit our own past.
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Soumya Sankar Bose: Braiding Dusk and Dawn runs 15 May to 7 July 2024. Open daily, 12:00 – 18:00. Thursdays until 20:00.