Sohrab Hura’s Photographs Rest Between Testimony and Confession

New Delhi-based artist Sohrab Hura’s first US survey, ‘Mother’, showcases the many different mediums he employs, from the lens-based practice for which he is best-known to more recent forays into drawing and painting. Sitting somewhere between testimony and confession, his perspective scrambles the autobiographical and the sociopolitical in unexpected and often revealing ways.

The black and white photographs comprising the earliest work on display, Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–06), document the daily hardships experienced by rural communities in central India, as well as their ongoing fight for dignity and justice. Hura pairs the images with hand-scrawled captions that situate them within a diaristic frame, offsetting the possibility of objectifying his subjects through the camera lens. Shot over numerous visits to Kashmir, Snow (2015–ongoing) deftly tackles the ongoing military occupation in the restive northern state, highlighting instances of everyday abjection as the wintry landscape gradually thaws: a patch of blood from a recently butchered chicken; a hand holding out a bundle of freshly shorn hair like an offering. While this macabre subtext emphasizes the banality and pervasiveness of violence under occupation, other photographs feel more specific and even prescient. A snowball furtively cradled behind a back seems to symbolize both a powerful commitment to resistance and its ultimate futility in the face of the occupying army’s tremendous might, while a pile of animal eyes memorializes the many innocents blinded by the pellets used to quell nonviolent protest in recent years.

The abject is even more pronounced in The Coast (2013–19; 2020), a suite of photographs and a video that Hura took at a religious festival in Tamil Nadu. Shot through with lurid colour and a blinding flash that renders places otherworldly and bodies incandescent, the photos feature a masquerade of familiar surrealist tropes of body horror, ocular anxiety and gender slippage. Sight is central to Hindu religious practice, but the many eyes that appear in these images, sometimes enlarged or clouded over, portend something more sinister: a growing culture of surveillance that, paradoxically, obfuscates what can be seen and known. Metaphorizing the shoreline as the nation’s ‘skin’, the video presents the nighttime ceremonial submersion that marks the festival’s close as a collective libidinal release, at once cathartic and unhinged. The related single-channel video The Lost Head and the Bird (2019) develops this further. As the narrated titular parable concludes, a slideshow of photographs from The Coast gradually speeds up into a dizzying frenzy of found images: news coverage of bizarre and horrific stories, iconic Bollywood stills, scavenged WhatsApp clips documenting incidences of misogyny and hate. This visual barrage approximates the hysterical unconscious of a nation that has lost its head and is increasingly untethered from reality, truth and civility.

Over the past few years, Hura has experimented with translating his particular way of seeing into slower mediums such as pastel drawing and painting in gouache and acrylic, a shift that softens abjection with humour and an almost-palpable tenderness. A salon-style hang of vividly coloured drawings includes portraits of family and friends and scenes of everyday life: small intimacies, secret joys, inevitable deaths. While some show a fidelity to a photographic source, retaining a selfie’s perspective and crop or a snapshot’s intimacy and immediacy, others feel wholly imagined, cumulatively blurring distinct modes of making and consuming pictures. Images of Hura’s mother – the subject of his first three self-published photobooks – reappear across this display, which is juxtaposed with Bittersweet (2019), a discomfiting video slideshow that provides intimate access to her struggles with acute paranoid schizophrenia. The varied strands of Hura’s practice that weave through ‘Mother’ suggest that her condition might also serve as an apt metaphor for the current state of his motherland.

Sohrab Hura, ‘Mother’, is on view at MoMA PS1, New York, until 17 February

^{Main image: Sohrab Hura, Land of a Thousand Struggles, 2005-2006, in Sohrab Hura, ‘Mother’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: MoMA PS1, New York; photograph: Steven Paneccasio}