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.
Read MoreHura has been involved with the internationally renowned agency Magnum Photos since 2014. In 2019, he had his first museum solo show at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio. Titled The Levee: A Photographer in the American South, the exhibition featured documentation tracking the artist's journey along the Mississippi River in 2016.
Hura holds a masters degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics (2005). A self-taught photographer, his influences include the photographer Josef Koudelka, and writers Ismat Chughtai, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Julio Cortázar, among others.
Hura's early works emerged from his keen observations of the socio-political climate of India. In 2005, the artist participated in a 52 day bus journey across ten states of India as part of the 'Right to Food' movement. The journey involved artists, journalists, residents, workers' unions, academics, activists, and students, who aimed to garner support for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which was passed later in the same year. Hura photographed the journey, recording the struggles of rural communities with drought and deforestation, which resulted in his work Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005).
It was on this bus journey that Hura first visited Pati, a cluster of villages in the barren landscape of Madhya Pradesh. This is where he made the black and white film Pati (2010), which pivoted from the artist's previous style of social documentary that observed issues relating to employment and livelihood, to focus on the everyday life of a community.
Hura's multimedia practice of film, photography, photojournalism, and text incorporates narrative and raw intimacy, often revisiting the same subjects. The Coast (2019), a photobook which begins with a fictional story about a woman whose head has been stolen, emerged from the artist's earlier film work The Lost Head and the Bird (2016). Incorporating a vividly jarring series of viral WhatsApp videos and footage of the sea in Tamil Nadu during a religious festivity, Hura deploys these clips in attempt to tackle themes such as the post-truth age, structures upholding violence, and state-controlled narratives.
Hura has also produced photographic series that grapple with extreme environments and contested territories in India. In Snow (2015—ongoing), Hura observes the contested state of Kashmir, a region frequented by tourists for its scenic winter beauty—but his images convey a hidden underlying violence. The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer (2013—ongoing) follows Savariyapani villagers in Madhya Pradesh, as they endure harsh summers in anticipation of the coming monsoons.
In another turning point, Hura began reflecting inward in his practice, creating works about his own family from a place of radical empathy. Works such as Bittersweet (2019) and A Proposition for Departure (2017) offer deeply personal insights into Hura's mother's struggle with paranoid schizophrenia.
In A Proposition for Departure, the artist explores the relationships between audio and visuals, working with an online synthesizer to scan and manipulate imagery into sound frequencies, in an attempt to 'extract sound' from an image and develop a sonic composition for the state of being around images.
Hura presented his inaugural curatorial project in 2021 at the Ishara Art Foundation. The exhibition Growing Like A Tree featured 14 artists and collectives from Germany and South and East Asia.
Hura founded the publishing imprint Ugly Dog in 2015. His first self-published photobook Life is Elsewhere (2015) grappled with his mother's mental illness. Other books include A Proposition for Departure (2017), Look It's Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018), The Coast (2019), and The Levee (2020).
Solo and group exhibitions include Constitutions, Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen, Concordia University, Montreal (2021); The Coast, Liverpool Biennial (2021); Spill, Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (2021); Spill, Experimenter, Kolkata (2020); Companion Pieces: New Photography 2020, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2020); Searching for Stars Amongst the Crescents, Experimenter, Kolkata (2019); VIDEONALE.17, Kunstmuseum Bonn (2019); The Levee: A Photographer in the American South, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati (2019); Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (2019); Eyes Wild Open, Botanique, Brussels (2018); The Levee, FotoFest Biennial, Houston (2018); Sweet Life, Experimenter, Kolkata (2017); and the 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), among others.
Hura's work can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA, Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, and the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Hura is represented by Experimenter in Kolkata.
In 2021, Hura was a recipient of the Asia Arts Game Changer Awards India,
Hura was awarded the Principal Prize at the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Online in 2020 for his film, Bittersweet (2019).; In 2019, his book The Coast (2019) won Photobook of the Year at The Paris Photo—Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, and in 2018, he received a Special Mention by the International Jury at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for The Lost Head & The Bird (2018).
Sohrab Hura's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Nadine Khalil | Ocula | 2021
