The Institute for Advanced Study in Nantes is proud to highlight the selection of A Discreet Exit Through Darkness | Things We Lost Last Night by Soumya Sankar Bose among the finalists of the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook Awards. This distinction honors a profound and compelling body of work by an artist who was the 2024–2025 resident of the Arts, Societies and Contemporary Mutations Chair.
image - “The shortlist for the 2025 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards” (all photographs by Daniel Salemi)
A Work of Memory, Disappearance, and Reconstruction
The book weaves together two interlaced narratives. On one side, A Discreet Exit Through Darkness draws from the artist’s grandfather’s diary, tracing his desperate search for his missing daughter in the turbulent India of the 1960s—amid rumors, political unrest, and popular beliefs. On the other, Things We Lost Last Night explores the fragmented memory of the artist’s mother, who returned with no recollection of the years she had been gone, and her attempt to piece together the missing time—a complex journey blending absence, imagination, and perceptual difficulty (notably prosopagnosia).
Beyond a family history, the work stands as a meditation on the traces of silence, the weight of the unsaid, and the ways in which personal narratives intertwine with historical fractures.
His Residency at the Institute
Soumya Sankar Bose develops a hybrid artistic practice that intertwines images, archival documents, oral histories, films, and artist books—a multidisciplinary approach that explores memory, identity, and marginalized narratives in post-Partition Bengal.
During his residency, he worked on a project titled “We Need to Talk in Whispers” a rigorous examination of contemporary suicide cases through archives, press records, letters, and significant sites across India (Joshimath, Varanasi, Darjeeling, among others), combined with a visual exploration of spaces marked by absence.
While in Nantes, he also organized the inaugural lecture of the Chair (October 2024) and presented the exhibition Things We Lost Last Night (February 2025), creating meaningful moments of exchange with the local public and establishing a dialogue between his artistic research and the cultural landscape of Nantes.
