Experimenter presents Where the Birds Never Sing (2017-2020), Soumya Sankar Bose’s second solo at the gallery.
The exhibition brings together Bose’s long-term project on the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979, of Bengali lower caste refugees from Marichjhapi Island in Sundarbans, West Bengal, India and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease. Employing re-enacted memories, in-depth research, interviews and oral histories of survivors in his photographs, Bose weaves an intricate mesh of fact and fiction bringing to light several perspectives of the same narrative, forming a cryptic framework of this problematic history facing slow erasure from collective memory.
Through his body of work, Bose touches upon complex political and social histories, caste hierarchies, contested rights to citizenship, police atrocities and refugee violence – concerns that continue to confront the sub-continent.
To find out more, visit the gallery’s website here.