Image as an alternative Archive

Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990, Midnapore, India) is an artist based in Kolkata, India. He reconstructs archival materials and oral history into photography, films, alternative archives, and artist books. Bose’s hybrid mode of practice interweaving long-term research and engagement with local communities including his own family history accentuates certain subaltern experiences of the marginalised yet resilient in post-Partition Bengal. Enmeshing fiction and reality, Bose’s work opens up daring realms of memory, desire, vulnerability and identity.

Through photography, film and installation, Bose questions memory, vulnerability and identity. His work has been exhibited at the Ishara Foundation in Dubai, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, and has been praised by media such as the New York Times and the BBC. In 2023, he won the Louis Roederer Discovery prize at the Rencontres d'Arles.

Artist in residence as part of the “Arts, societies and contemporary mutations” artistic chair founded by Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, Institut d'Études Avancées de Nantes, Lieu Unique and Nantes Métropole.