SOHRAB HURA

Reflecting on the transition of snow in Kashmir and the scorching summer in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh, the photographs from Snow and The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer also consider two fundamentally different social, economic, and political landscapes through the unravelling of two extreme seasons. Hura documents Kashmir through the passage of winter in Snow, which occurs in three distinct phases: Chillai Kalan (harsh cold), Chillai Khurd (small cold), and Chillai Bachha (baby cold). Snow registers the progression through these phases. The melting of the snow offers a metaphor for the fraught conditions of the region and a deliberate disruption of the illusion of a ‘paradise’—where the picturesque gives way to residual markers of conflict and violence. Hura’s gaze as an outsider anchors the images while also underscoring how the complexities in the region demand a deeper introspection. Known for its mesmerising beauty, Kashmir has been promoted as an idyllic tourist destination for Indian nationals to experience snow, even as the area remains one of the most militarised in the world—an incongruity that served as inspiration for this work. While Hura visited Kashmir dozens of times over almost a five-year period, his last visit, for a friend’s wedding, in August 2019, was cut short when the Indian government removed Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status through Article 370, and a siege ensued. The body of work compels us to think about how the prolonged impact of everyday violence is much more expansive and ambiguous than what we continuously absorb from the constant stream of propaganda in mainstream media and popular entertainment.

The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer began in 2013 when Hura started photographing the summer in Savariyapani, a small village panchayat secluded amongst the barren landscape at Barwani in the central state of Madhya Pradesh in India. The body of work also has connections with Hura’s earlier works, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–06) and video work Pati (2010/2020 Iteration). With beginnings rooted strongly in the documentary, Land of a Thousand Struggles and Pati are records that Hura made immediately after finishing his university studies when he embarked on a fifty-day long bus journey across the north Indian rural belt with his university professor Jean Dreze and others from civil society who were part of the Right to Food movement. The journey was a final push to demand for the enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which eventually became the biggest social security measure undertaken by any government anywhere at the time, with a focus to provide the right to employment with dignity. It was also this journey that took him to Pati—a small cluster of village panchayats in Madhya Pradesh (central India) where Hura would continue to return and work for the next fifteen owing to the relationships first forged with The Jagrut Adivasi Dalit Sangathan (JADS), a unionised people’s movement during the visit on the long road trip.

In The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, which brings alive the contours of a parched region with little rainfall and extreme temperatures, Hura transcends beyond just depicting the chokehold of heat. The photographs evoke the murmurs of an ephemeral state, seeking to capture the pulse of a place and its lived realities—often overlooked, and lost amid the swirls of a dust storm or the languor of an afternoon.

Through these bodies of work—emerging from different seasons, places, and moments—A Winter Summer examines the contrasts and connections that both divide and unite them, while revealing the layers of contradiction, deceit, and hierarchy often buried within the familiar subconscious.

Sohrab Hura (b. 1981) lives and works in New Delhi, India. Sohrab will be showing works at Arsenale and Giardini as part of the The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys curated by Koyo Kouoh, opening on 9 May 2026.