Soumya Sankar Bose Midnapore, India, b. 1990
Soumya Sankar Bose (b. 1990, Midnapore, India) 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. Soumya Sankar Bose was awarded Magnum Foundation’s Social Justice Fellowship for Full Moon on a Dark Night in 2017 and received the Louis Roederer Discovery Public Award at Rencontres d’Arles for A discreet exit through darkness in 2023.
Bose also received The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (Amol Vadehra Art Grant), The Agroecology Fund, Murthy Nayak Foundation Photobook Grant, Henry Luce Foundation grant and India Foundation for the Arts’ grant. Where the Birds Never Sing was selected as PHmuseum’s Best Photobooks of 2020 and shortlisted for the Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation First Photobook Award as well as the Lucie Photo Book Prize 2021. Bose’s work has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art Review Asia, NPR, Granta, BBC, The Caravan and Indian Express among many others.
Soumya Sankar Bose lives and works in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.