Deep Dive | Soumya Sankar Bose

Soumya Sankar Bose's Where the Birds Never Sing is a body of work about the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, West Bengal, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease. Bose, over the last three years, has been researching and re-enacting memories of the survivors in specific locations, as there is almost no written record of the incident. Through the intricate weaving of fact and fiction of existing oral histories of the real survivors, he brings to light several perspectives of the same narrative, forming a cryptic framework of this problematic history that is facing a slow erasure from memory.

Biographies

Soumya Sankar Bose's (b. 1990) collaborative photographs re-examine traumatic pasts and imagine possible futures, through his subjects' visions and anxieties. His most recent project Where the Birds Never Sing (2017- 2020) is a body of work on the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of Bangladeshi refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, West Bengal, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease. Bose is the recipient of the The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art's Amol Vadehra Art Grant in 2020. His project, Full Moon on a Dark Night was awarded Magnum Foundation's Photography and Social Justice Fellowship in 2017. Bose is the recipient of IFA grant for the project, Let's Sing an Old Song in 2015. Bose lives and works in Kolkata, India.

Sabih Ahmed is the Associate Director and Curator of Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai. His curatorial work and research focus on modern and contemporary art of South Asia through diverse itineraries, languages and inter-disciplinary formations. Prior to joining Ishara, he was a Senior Researcher and Projects Manager at Asia Art Archive from 2009 to 2019 where he was involved in the establishing of AAA in India (AAA in I) in New Delhi. Ahmed has led research projects focusing on the digitisation of seminal artist archives, digital bibliographies of art across languages, and has organised colloquia and seminars around archives and educational resources. Ahmed's curatorial projects include the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016) in the capacity of a Curatorial Collegiate, curated by Raqs Media Collective; The Superhero Sighting Society (2019) exhibition and symposium in collaboration with artist Taus Makhacheva at KADIST and Centre Pompidou in Paris; and he is among the ensemble of curatorial mentors for Five Million Incidents (2019-2020) organized by Goethe-Institut, Delhi & Kolkata, conceived by Raqs Media Collective. Ahmed has served as a Visiting Faculty at the Ambedkar University Delhi from 2014 to 2019 teaching Art & Technology and Curatorial Investigations. His writings have been published by Art Cabinet, Mousse, The Whitworth, and Oncurating. Ahmed is on the Advisory Board of Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation, Delhi.