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 a horrible mess.” Her lifeless body was discovered a couple of hours later. This statement returns to haunt one of her students when, years later, they write their own farewell note to the world from a hostel attic.
Among the other stories, the viewer encounters a software engineer in Nantes, France, who is also “an amateur writer”, recording his dying confessions in a diary. Yet another room holds the tragedy of Rabi, who was driven to suicide by an unhappy marriage and joblessness. Ira, with whom he had an aborted romantic relationship, recounts his story. Last but not least, the viewer meets Srimoyee, who ends her life in a hotel room in Puri, Odisha, leaving behind a suicide note and a copy of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus.
As the reader walks from room to room, questions besiege the mind. Are these people real or imagined? In whose handwriting were their stories recorded inside the booklets? Where do the photographs and video work come from? The artist, at best, offers some elliptical answers.
“I wanted to complete Brinni’s diary,” Bose says. “The handwriting in the booklets is neither mine nor Brinni’s. My intention in this project was to ask: How can I build a narrative where I am not the protagonist?” He cites Bangladeshi writer Shahidul Zahir and German writer and academic W.G. Sebald, who used found photographs in his work, as key influences.
“Photographs tell stories, they keep memories. If the original story-teller or memory-keeper is no longer there, the image becomes orphaned and abstract,” Bose says. “I collected some of the photos from flea markets all over the world, bought a few from studios in Murshidabad, some are from personal archives, or were staged.” In this process of collating found photographs, the artist’s role was to infuse new memories into the images, replacing the ones that have been lost.
This, Bose adds, is the process by which memories get handed down through generations. “As we grow older, we begin to own the stories our fathers and grandfathers told us, but these are, by their very nature, also fictional—because we have heard them second hand,” he says. “After our death, someone else may come in and remake the memories we leave behind.” It’s an idea that has informed Bose’s practice in general but assumes a textured expression in the final work on display.
On the gallery’s upper level sits a desktop computer, uploaded with a locally operated large language model (LLM) software, whose memory has been shaped by Brinni’s research, the diary entries found in her journal, Bose’s interpretation of the material and the case studies described in the show. Viewers are invited to interact with the machine by discussing the show, ask it general questions, or even share their private thoughts.
“Artificial intelligence can’t create its own memories. It’s always learning from other people’s memories,” Bose says. “Since the bot is offline, any conversation it has with the viewer helps it build new memories.” He admits the piece was created to engage the Gen-Z viewer, though the idea far exceeds the imperatives of a gimmick, especially since AI bots, in the real world, have been accused of abetting users to self-harm and suicide.
By contrast, Bose’s “interactive archive of memories” offers the viewer an oddly safe space, if not a sense of solace, bringing them closer to a community of strangers who share their thoughts and feelings inside the anonymity of a chatroom moderated by an artificial entity that has been trained to listen and not judge, to empathise but not prescribe.
Till 6 June at Experimenter, Ballygunge, Kolkata.