Orhan Pamuk’s novel, The Museum of Innocence, examined the preservation and distortion of memory. Fittingly, Swapan Nayak’s exhibition, Museum of Innocence (it was hosted at Ganges Art Gallery recently), harks back to his childhood memories of rural Bengal. The redness of Birbhum’s soil becomes the colour of these vignettes in which Nayak opts for gum bichromate printing — a technique developed in the 19th century — giving his photographs a surreal, dream-like quality.

These monochromatic, aqueous scenes from Nayak’s memories form graveyards of objet trouvés such as pinwheels, glasses, a discarded crown of a goddess, a transistor radio and so on that are strewn across faintly visible landscapes. The most haunting of his works, though, is an Untitled one (picture) that has an open-door frame and a tree standing amidst a rolling field. A bird is caught right in the middle of the frame — is it flying towards freedom or towards the safety of a shelter, provoking the viewer to wonder whether there really is a difference between the two?