LONG ISLAND CITY, NY.- The first US survey of artist Sohrab Hura (Indian, b. 1981) showcases more than fifty works from the last two decades of his experimental practice. On view from October 10, 2024 through February 2025, Sohrab Hura: Mother weaves together bodies of work across photography, film, sound, drawing, painting, and text that have never before been shown together. Self-trained and beginning his career in documentary photography, Hura quickly took on an essayistic and experimental approach, using multiple media to produce his layered work. Renowned for capturing remarkable everyday moments that give form to systemic political forces, Hura brings into focus colonially imposed borders, the trauma of partition, and the changing ecosystem of the Indian subcontinent.
This survey includes key early works such as Pati (2010), a film that explores a rural Indian region in Madhya Pradesh and its role in the movement to pass the 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which promised all citizens a minimum of one hundred days of employment. The work follows the artist’s ongoing relationship with the region, whose verdant landscape has been desiccated due to deforestation. Narrating his visits with keen attention to local residents, Hura combines still and moving images that attest to the everyday lives of those who remain in the area. Further juxtaposing sociopolitical concerns and landscape, the photographs and appropriated television footage that comprise Snow (2015–ongoing) document the contested region of Kashmir from first snowfall through spring thaw. With an expansive cinematic approach, The Coast (2019) offers India’s coastline as a lens to examine the nation’s changing politics through more than 50 photographs, a film, and a book. Focused on the subcontinent’s coastline, the work centers on a beach in Tamil Nadu, where sins are washed away in the ocean during an annual masquerade festival.
Attending to the power of afterimages, other films like The Lost Head & The Bird (2017) sequence footage from Whatsapp videos, Nintendo video games, and news media. As digital forms of dissent become increasingly restricted, Hura’s incisive synthesis of visual material signals both innovation and provocation. His images, stripped of their original context, blur fiction and reality. Hura relates his use of rapid montage to the shifting circulation of violent imagery across digital platforms. "There is a sort of new language of photography coming into existence because of the looseness of social media. It’s weird, it’s surprising, it’s ugly, it’s beautiful, it’s voyeuristic, it’s narcissistic, it’s ordinary, it’s precise, it’s misleading, it’s a lot of contradictions put together,” he has said.
In response to the changing digital landscape, the Magnum photographer (only the second from India) has recently expanded beyond the lens-based strategies for which Hura became known. The exhibition’s title, Mother, references the familial relations that anchor works like Bittersweet (2019), a video that chronicles his mother and her dog following a diagnosis with paranoid schizophrenia, as well as ties to places that transcend patriarchal associations with nationhood. The survey includes a selection of newly produced pastel drawings and gouache paintings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–ongoing) and Ghosts in My Sleep (2023–ongoing), which depict scenes and memories both real and imagined. Through cathartic strategies of personal and political introspection, the exhibition traces Hura’s shifting existential concerns around the ethics of image-making as a documentary act.
Sohrab Hura (Indian, b. 1981) is a photographer and filmmaker who lives and works in New Delhi, India. Recent solo and group exhibitions have been presented at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; Liverpool Biennial 2021; Kunstmuseum Bonn; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; and the Cincinnati Art Museum. His films have been shown in film festivals such as the Berlin International Film Festival and the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen. Hura has self-published five books under the imprint Ugly Dog. His work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; and the Cincinnati Art Museum, among others.
Sohrab Hura: Mother is organized by Ruba Katrib, Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, with Sheldon Gooch, Curatorial Assistant.
