Soumya Sankar Bose's new work reflects on memories and moments from the end of life

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Soumya Sankar Bose’s new show We Need to Talk In Whispers at Experimenter, Ballygunge, in Kolkata is inspired by a journal he found on an overnight train journey from Howrah to Koraput. It seemed to be a curious “exploration of thanatology,” as the exhibition notes explain, a repository of “suicide notes” and “memories people hold on to in their final moments”.

The notebook, which once belonged to a stranger called Brinni, became the “entry point”, Bose tells me, for his investigations into the nature of photography, memory and storytelling in this new body of work.None of these impulses are novel or original for the artist. Bose’s earlier work trespassed over similar terrains, reconstructing the lost memories of the 1979 Marichjhapi Massacre in Where the Birds Never Sing (2017-20) and his mother’s disappearance from 1969 to 1971 in A Discreet Exit Through Darkness (2022 to present).

What makes his latest body of work stand out is a newfound appreciation of interiority, achieved through a complex textual framing rather than heavy reliance on dramatic, imagistic representation.The narrative of We Need to Talk In Whispers is made up of distinct stories, coming together to form an affective whole. Each room of the gallery has a slim booklet—which has extracts from Brinni’s diary, Bose’s musings on the passages, newspaper clippings and other ephemera—alongside images and video installed on the walls.The viewer starts their tour with the story of Dolly Ma’am, who was found dead by suicide in the rented warehouse she gave private tuitions in Kutubpur in Uttar Pradesh.

At their final lesson, she had told her students, “If you ever do something terrible in life, don’t do it at home. It will be