Sohrab Hura: Mother @MoMA PS1

JTF (just the facts): A retrospective survey exhibition, installed in series of four connected rooms on the second floor of the museum. The exhibition was organized by Ruba Katrib, with assistance from Sheldon Gooch.

The following works are included in the exhibition:

  • 1 set of 22 matte photograph paper with text, photographs of variable dimensions, and archival tape, 2005-2006, roughly sized either 21×15 or 14×19 inches each
  • 1 video (black and white, sound), 2010/2020, 11 minutes 48 seconds
  • 1 set of 22 inkjet prints, 2013-ongoing, each sized roughly 16×11 inches
  • 1 set of 56 archival pigment prints, 2013-2019, each sized 24×16 inches
  • 1 set of 27 inkjet print, 2015-ongoing, each sized 24×24 or 20×20 inches
  • 1 four-channel video, 2015-2021, 14 minutes 9 seconds
  • 1 high definition video (color, sound), 2019, 10 minutes 13 seconds
  • 1 video (color, sound), 2019, 13 minutes 48 seconds
  • 1 single-channel video (color, sound), 2020, 17 minutes 27 seconds
  • 1 set of 3 archival pigment prints on dibond, 2020, roughly sized 10×8, 10×15 inches
  • 18 gouache on paper, 2023, 2024, roughly sized 10×8, 8×10 inches
  • 9 artist books, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024
  • 52 soft pastel on paper, 2022, 2023, 2024, dimensions variable
  • 1 installation of acrylic and gesso on nine corrugated cardboard boxes, 2024-ongoing

(Installation shots and video stills below.)

Comments/Context: In the past two decades, the Indian photographer Sohrab Hura has quietly been building an enviable artistic reputation, so this first US institutional survey of his work comes along at just the right time to cement our understanding of his ongoing development. Between his active photobook-making practice (we’ve reviewed four of his photobooks since 2015) and his continuing association with Magnum Photos, Hura has popped up again and again in recent years. But this succinctly edited exhibit connects the dots for first time, making it much clearer how his various projects (in not only photography, but in video and other mediums) fit into a larger artistic arc that continues to gather steam.

Hura’s educational background in economics (he holds a Masters degree from the Delhi School of Economics) likely helped shape his early interests and perspectives, which loosely fall into a social documentary or even activist approach. His 2005-2006 project Land of a Thousand Struggles is the earliest work included in this survey, gathering together annotated black-and-white images made on a 52-day bus trip through rural India. Along the way, he met with families, farmers, and other workers, documenting their lives and struggles, in the broader context of the movement to pass the 2005 National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. Hung in a dense edge-t0-edge grid, the images sensitively capture the choices and everyday hardships endured by these people scratching out a living on dry desolate land, with the hand-written captions adding background and complexity to the individual stories in the photographs. A few years later, Hura then turned a mix of still images and video snippets into a short almost neo-realist film called Pati (named after one of the towns in Madhya Pradesh), which amplifies many of the same themes, particularly the efforts of women (and children) working and the effects of deforestation on the land.

In the following years, Hura’s eye seems to have slowly evolved, deliberately turning toward more personal perspectives and more atmospheric subjects. His project The Songs of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer (which began in 2013 and is ongoing) starts with hot dusty summer views of farm life but then becomes more evocative, from the tenderness of fathers and daughters to the playfulness of seaside water splashes and soft touches, with unexpected blurs, blown hair, and mirror flashes adding to a sense of fleeting magic. His project Snow (started in 2015 and ongoing) shifts seasonally to winter, tracking the arrival of heavy snow, the muddy thaw/melt, and eventually the coming of spring in Kashmir, with even more outsider distance and observational lyricism. Hura’s metaphorical discoveries include a hidden snowball and a grasp for a bird in the snow, which give way to farmers hauling hay and fallen oranges in a wet ditch, and eventually to the first sunny dandelions of the season, with the simmering tensions of the longstanding conflict in the region never far from view. Hura has also used the situation in Kashmir as the subject of a four-channel video (also titled Snow), interleaving television footage of the region from the 1980s and 1990s, where scenes of everyday activities have been ambiguously mixed with more political imagery of protests, soldiers, tanks, and fighter jets.

During these same years, Hura was also making even more hauntingly personal images, chronicling his mother’s continued struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. His photographs first took form as photobooks (in grainy, flash lit black-and-white, in Life is Elsewhere, from 2015, reviewed here, and again in color, in Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!, from 2018, reviewed here) and later in 2019, he used still images from both projects, as well as other moving footage, to create his video Bittersweet, which has been included in this exhibit. The video is filled with tender observations and quiet loving moments, even when his mother is clearly going through rougher periods. Hura’s mother is generally seen at home, often interacting with her dog Elsa, who is as much of a character in this video as the mother is. Many of the black-and-white stills document his mother’s hollow isolation, and the vulnerabilities she feels when she is down; better days are decorated with small joys, but there is clearly an up and down pattern to the mother’s life that Hura captures with compassion and measured hope.

Among the strongest works in this show are those that come next in Hura’s artistic progression, an integrated project made in 2019 that includes photographs, a photobook (with various short stories), and two videos, all centered along India’s coastline. The photographs from The Coast (reviewed here in photobook form) are brashly colored, flash-lit scenes of nocturnal energy, documenting everything from bonfires, stray dogs, and seduction to bloody violence, surreal strangeness, and watery release. Hura then sequenced these images into changing pairings for a video titled The Lost Head and the Bird, the juxtapositions making the original meanings unclear; the first image (a nude with her head inexplicably hidden and seemingly not there) provides the fodder for a surreal short story, and the uneasy visual pairings eventually speed up and are replaced by snippets of Internet sourced videos (including everything from cute cats to political propaganda), where the concepts of truth and identifiable reality are even less clear.The last section of the project is the video The Coast, where Hura documents pilgrims (mostly fully clothed) as they walk past the carnival attractions and into the nighttime waves; between the crashing of the waves, the submerged bodies in the water, and the joyful smiles, the video revels in a meditatively liberating sense of ecstatic cleansing.

The newer works in the exhibit find Hura extending his artistic efforts out in directions beyond photography and video, exploring the possibilities of pastel and gouache in particular. In general, Hura is reinterpreting his own snapshots and photographs, playing with the mutability of memory and the expressiveness of transforming one medium unto another. In many cases, Hura is paring down to more elemental compositions, clarifying and amplifying colors, emotions, and experiences; in others, he seems to be enjoying the process of isolating specific details, moments, or gestures, sharpening each memory (or imaginary scene) by forcing himself to re-see it by hand. When applied to the various planes of cardboard boxes, these painted scenes jumble and overlap, remixing histories and resonant moments into a shifting pile of reuse.

To my eye, Hura is a more effective and energetic artistic communicator in photography and video than he is in other mediums, making these recent projects feel more like exploratory afterthoughts than new ideas. But it’s also clear that as he matrixes these varying approaches together, he’s pushing his own personal interaction with his subjects into different areas, testing and extending his own boundaries. Hura the visual risk taker is clearly an artist worth watching, as evidenced by the many singular photographic images on view here that seem to simmer with crackling intensity and personal engagement. What we’ve been shown so far in this functional survey is perhaps a kind of prelude, an experimental time when the artist has slowly begun to get comfortable with trusting his own voice. The artistic evidence presented here says Hura is poised for a jump to the next level of synthesis and maturity in his work; where that newfound confidence actually leads is the as-yet-unwritten next chapter in this evolving story.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum exhibition, there are of course no posted prices. Hura is represented by Experimenter in Kolkata and Mumbai (here), and by Magnum Photos (here), where he became a nominee in 2014 and a full member in 2020. His work has not yet found its way to the secondary markets, so gallery retail remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Send this article to a friend

Read more about: Sohrab Hura, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.

Recent Articles

Fumitsugu Takedo, Ambience Decay

Fumitsugu Takedo, Ambience Decay

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2024 by Photobook Daydream Editions (Instagram link here). Hardcover (6 x 9 inches), 120 pages, with 118 color photographs. In an edition of 50 ... Read on.

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter

This field is required.