Sohrab Hura

South Asia Incubator - Mentor

India

(b.1981) Sohrab Hura lives and works in New Delhi, India. His work with Drawings, Film, Photographs, Sound and Text are part of fluid relationship with the ‘Image.’ Many of his works attempt to question a constantly shifting world and his own place within it. Family and Illness reside at the heart of the photobooks Life Is Elsewhere and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! Similar reflections on the everyday ordinariness are also explored with pastel drawings in Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed. On the other hand the experimental film The Lost Head & The Bird looks directly at the infrastructure of power and systems and the role of story-telling within it. Sohrab has expressed the hope that his work can be “experienced like a tree” with deep roots: each work is a separate branch, and “no matter how different from the neighbouring ones,” each is “connected to the other branches by a single trunk.”

Select recent and upcoming solo and group exhibitions include Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (India Art Fair 2023), the profile Sohrab Hura: Half-Moving at International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Making Waves: A New Generation of Indian Independent Filmmakers (MoMA New York 2022), Indigo Waves And Other Stories: Re-Navigating The Afrasian Sea And Notions Of Diaspora (Zeitz Mocaa, 2022), An Ocean In Every Drop (Jameel Art Centre, 2022), Spill (Huis Marseille voor Fotografie, 2021)The Coast (Liverpool Biennial 2021), Videonale (Kunst Museum Bonn 2021, 2019), Companion Pieces: New Photography (MoMA New York 2020), Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan (Kettle’s Yard, 2019), The Levee: A photographer in the American South (Cincinnati Art Museum, 2019), Berlin Atonal (2019).

The film The Coast (2020) premiered at Berlinale 2021 while Bittersweet (2019) was awarded the Principal Prize of the International Jury at the 66 th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. The Lost Head & The Bird (2017) had previously won the NRW Award at the 64 th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2018. Sohrab Hura has self-published five books under the imprint UGLY DOG. His book The Coast (2019) won The Aperture – Paris Photo PhotoBook of the Year Award 2019. The exhibition Growing Like A Tree (2021) opened in January 2021 at Ishara Art Foundation marking his inaugural curatorial project. The second iteration of this curated exhibition titled Growing Like A Tree: Static In The Air opened at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai over six slow transformations in September 2021. His work can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Ishara Art Foundation, KNMA, Cincinnati Art Museum and other private and public collections.