The Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire, le lieu unique, the city of Nantes and the Institut d'études avancées gladly welcome Soumya Sankar Bose, tenant of the Arts, Society and Contemporary mutations Chair for the 2024-2025 period.
This chair dedicated to the visual arts, sponsored by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, associate member of the Institut d'études avancées, aims to highlight dialogues between :
- north and south,
- artistic research and the human and social sciences,
- the worlds of research, creation, teaching and artistic dissemination.
Soumya Sankar Bose
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.
In parallel with his long and meticulous research work, S. Sankar Bose creates what he calls alternative archives, which are representations of an incident and its repercussions. He reconstructs archival materials and oral history into photography, films, alternative archives, and artist books. These alternative archives are both the only traces of these events and reflections on their repercussions.
Research project
We Need to Talk in Whispers
Bose's new project 'We Need to Talk in Whispers' is a rigorous scrutiny of suicide cases from recent past. These references found in various case studies, suicide notes, newspaper archives, court verdicts and oral memories intrigued Bose to visit various places in India such as, JoshiMath in Uttarakhand; Benaras in Uttar Pradesh; Darjeeling, Shantiniketan and Digha in West Bengal.
Current Chair tenant
Inaugural conference of the Chair
Chair coordinator
Presentation of the Chair
Video in French
