New Delhi, May 3 -- Soumya Sankar Bose's new show We Need to Talk In Whispers at Experimenter, Ballygunge, in Kolkata is inspired by a journal he found on an overnight train journey from Howrah to Koraput. It seemed to be a curious "exploration of thanatology," as the exhibition notes explain, a repository of "suicide notes" and "memories people hold on to in their final moments". The notebook, which once belonged to a stranger called Brinni, became the "entry point", Bose tells me, for his investigations into the nature of photography, memory and storytelling in this new body of work.

None of these impulses are novel or original for the artist. Bose's earlier work trespassed over similar terrains, reconstructing the lost memories of the...