Gradually, the home becomes as possessed as the father. A shadow with a pronounced bird’s head and exaggerated beak stalks dark corners. It is an omnipresence as the hunt progresses, but the father’s life stalls. It eventually ends. The home is gone and in a forest, an old television monitor flickers through photos of a family’s life rituals; birth, illness, death. Based on a true incident, Bose explains that it remains an unspoken episode, “I’ve never asked,” he explains. “I use fiction for this work because I don’t want to torture her with the memories. I’m not a journalist.”

The photographs, that are an integral part of the exhibition, are typical of Bose’s long term view and continued engagements in retrieving stories from smaller communities, the unacknowledged and unattended. This approach runs through all his projects across his practice, finding overlaps in negotiating time, recollecting the archive and in many case restaging situations. The images portray a nether land, set against a backdrop where light and darkness shadow-play in a way that truth and imagination do in this body of work. Since the core of the project is made through interviews and recalled from memory of family members and acquaintances, who revisit this 50 years after the actual incident, a hazy picture emerges which becomes the scaffolding for the film and the photographs. As a result, the images are staged with actors and made in landscapes that may have resembled the time and the moment but is not journalistic in nature as Bose states. Although Bose pursues the truth, following through the narrative as it unfolds from the memory of people, it very much straddles the space in between truth and fiction.