Experimenter presents Ghosts in My Sleep, Sohrab Hura's (b.1981 lives and works in New Delhi, India) solo at Experimenter – Colaba during Mumbai Gallery Weekend 2024. The exhibition takes its title from a new body of work comprising works on paper made with gouache. Alongside these small paintings, the ongoing pastel drawings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed, the short film _Bittersweet _as well as other image and sound notations dispersed across the gallery underscore Hura's ongoing engagement with the 'image'. While photography marked his beginnings and has been integral to the core of his practice, subsequent shifts towards experimentation with the moving image and sound and now drawing and painting are simply Hura continuing to engage with a constantly shifting image world. Perhaps this shift to 'trying to work more with his hands' is also an existential attempt at finding something 'more real' at a time when the screen has become the primary interface to determine what is real or not. These new 'broken images' that he feels he trusts more and more, carry with them undercurrents similar to his early photographic works that had a tendency to reflect upon every day ordinariness of love, joy, relationships and the familial. His immediate space also includes animals while the significance of title texts, tempering the tone of the images, creates a parallel between this body of work with the format of a photo book.
Sohrab Hura is an Indian photographer and filmmaker based in New Delhi. His genre-bending cross-disciplinary approach to photography, film, sound, text, and publishing is influenced by Bruce Lee's hybrid martial arts philosophy Jeet Kune Do, which encourages fluidity and formlessness.
Experimenter was co-founded by Prateek & Priyanka Raja in 2009. With a multidisciplinary approach, the gallery is an incubator for an ambitious and challenging contemporary practice. The program represents some of the most critical contemporary artists worldwide. Considered to be a ‘pace-setter’ for its region, the program extends from exhibition-making, to knowledge creation, through regular talks, performances, workshops and most importantly, through it’s much acclaimed, annual curatorial intensive, Experimenter Curators’ Hub. In 2016, its artist-book publishing wing, Experimenter Books was launched. Experimenter’s program is rooted in dialogue and dissent. In 2018, the Experimenter Learning Program (ELP) was launched. ELP enables discussion, debate and learning in fields of contemporary and performing arts, curatorship, film, writing, language and social culture. In 2019, Experimenter Outpost an iterative exhibitions program outside the physical gallery where an extension of the program temporarily inhabits disused, characterful spaces was launched. In 2020, Experimenter Labs, an inclusive, experimental, online platform in addition to the onsite gallery programming was launched. Its third space Experimenter – Colaba, established in 2022, underscores the commitment of its discursive programming to Mumbai, a city that in turn represents the diverse pluralities of the region.
