‘Wonderful and Vicious Things’

In February 2023 the photographer Sohrab Hura mounted an unusual show on the upper floor of a gutted factory on the smoky margins of New Delhi. Although it lasted only a few days, Half-Moving brought together, for the first time, a number of his video works. There were enough projection screens and monitors—and even one old-fashioned television set—for their ambient flicker to light up the dim interiors. 

Occupying a central place in this half-improvised studio space was The Coast (2020), a seventeen-and-a-half-minute video that shows waves crashing on the shore in inky nighttime darkness, as men and women emerge out of the sea and then disappear into it, in endless iterations. These are not ordinary bathers. Many of the men are bare-chested and wear beads that mark them off as pilgrims; others are fully dressed. They are in a state of exhilaration: a police officer swaggers out of the water wearing his uniform, a baby is dunked into the sea. There is a sense of ablution, a ritual cleansing. 

Throughout, the camera pans restlessly across a narrow stretch of the shore, back and forth in a lyrical rhythm. By slowing down the frame rate Hura draws the viewer into a state of heightened attention, even meditation. Only on a few occasions does the camera break loose from its tether, to offer a glimpse of things nearby: what might be a preparation for a trance at a temple, an unexpectedly long tracking shot of people riding a fairground carousel. Without text, voiceover, or context of any kind, the video seems to obliquely invoke cinema verité.

Somewhere in the further recesses of the show, pinned lightly on a wall in the form of a well-lit grid, were around fifty photographs Hura made along India’s southern coastline. They are shot at night, in the harsh, unforgiving light of a flash, in hot, saturated color. Originally published in his 2018 photobook The Coast, the images are beguiling at first: an apparently headless torso poses on a bed, eager lovers kiss, a parakeet rests on a man’s hand. But gradually, more unsettling pictures draw one’s attention: a tear-stained face, a women’s breast that bears what appear to be fresh teeth marks, a bloodied head. They seem to suggest transformations—between men and women, devotee and divinity, and frequently tenderness and violence.

Hura returned to this material in the ten-minute-long video The Lost Head & the Bird (2016–2019). It begins with a black screen pulsed by a flash, over which a narrator reads a fable about a woman who has lost her head to an “obsessive lover.” Could the lost head belong to the headless torso we have just seen? And is the bird of the video’s title the parakeet pinned to the gallery wall? At one point the narrator even speaks of an “idiot of a photographer” who wants to take pictures of “all the wonderful and vicious things that happened along the Indian coastline.” 

But the fable does not hold its ground for long, as the comforting darkness of the screen is taken over by other images from The Coast. These appear in rapidly changing combinations, and in a split-screen. (In this the video is faithful to the book, where the facing pages are treated as a diptych, and each photograph repeats in different pairings.) Eventually this neat division too gives way, edged out by material that Hura plucked from the Internet ­and from the noxious stream of WhatsApp forwards—filled with aggression, violence, and the bizarre—that are inescapable in India. The images, propelled by a percussive electronic soundtrack by Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd Bruil, arrive at overwhelming speed, creating a centrifugal force that eventually leaves us uncertain, confused, and exhausted. 

The Coast and The Lost Head & the Bird are both currently playing at MOMA PS1 in New York, as part of the first survey of Hura’s work in the US. His photographs and videos fill several large, brightly lit rooms here, in contrast to the more subversive, almost samizdat feel of his factory show in New Delhi. A last room gathers his more recent experiments with drawing and painting; several of its walls are almost entirely covered with works in soft pastel and gouache. There is also frequent recourse to text. Hura annotates the display with delicate handwritten notes, some of which are scribbled directly on the gallery walls.

A modest shelf near the entrance carries a set of photobooks Hura self-published across a decade. Rifling through these is like peering at the seedbank of an arboretum: the images, stories, and ideas they contain appear in different forms throughout the show. A haunting portrait of Hura’s mother from the photobook Life is Elsewhere (2015), for instance, resurfaces in the video Bittersweet (2019), and then again as the radiant soft pastel Mother (2023). At times works gently riff on each other, at other times ricochet off one another forcefully. Throughout there is reiteration, recycling, returning, and also a palpable sense of restlessness, evident in the range of Hura’s exploration across media. 

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Born in 1981, Hura is a product of India’s insulated middle class. He attended an expensive residential school in north India, then studied economics at an elite university in New Delhi. He has frequently alluded to a journey he took in 2005, when, fresh out of university and still “enamored with the politics of the extreme left,” he traveled across northern and central India in a bus filled with grassroots campaigners spreading the word about the recently passed National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). The act’s provisions were far from radical: it only assured a hundred days of wage labor in a year for at least one adult member of every rural household, mostly in rock-bottom unskilled jobs, digging up earth for roads and tanks. All the same, it was a landmark advance in India’s welfare state, offering desperately needed employment to a population stalked by malnutrition and hunger. 

That fifty-two-day trip was Hura’s first exposure to the hardscrabble lives of those who live in some of the country’s most neglected regions. The pictures he volunteered to take on the bus journey eventually formed the basis of Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005–2006). Forty-seven black-and-white photographs from this series, made in what could be described as a social-realist style, are presented at PS1, in unexpectedly small sizes, placed within tabloid-sized frames, their margins covered in handwritten notes.

“Many children work at NREGA worksites not because their parents want them to but because of desperation,” one terse inscription reads below an image of a boy taking a pause between digging, his face as yet unmarked by the poverty that is grinding down others around him. The images and the annotations draw us close, and help limn the scale—as well as some of the magnificence—of these struggles. It is easy to see why this project brought attention to the young photographer. 

A Magnum Foundation grant followed in 2010. It led to The song of sparrows in a hundred days of summer (2013–ongoing), which Hura made over the course of several summer visits to the parched village of Savariyapani in the Barwani region of Madhya Pradesh, in India’s literal heartland. These carefully constructed images, in restrained, desaturated color, are a marked contrast to the earlier series. Everything is spare. A small portion of ground red chilies rests on two rotis, possibly the day’s only meal. A young woman faces away from the camera, combing her hair, her lean body reflecting a landscape of endemic hunger. 

Playing alongside this series is Pati (2010–2020), a twelve-minute-long video named after an eponymous cluster of villages in the same treeless region. It again emphasizes the backbreaking labor of men, women, and invariably children, many of whom are only splitting stones. Hura slows down the frame rate and playfully blurs the distinction between still and moving pictures. Did the grizzled face in the portrait blink? Does the newborn in a crib of swaddling cloth sway at all? In gestures like these, the video strains against the realist conventions that govern the photographs he made in the same setting. 

Somewhere near the middle of Pati, a family of masons is shown at work on a building. The image is hard to shake off: a little child, a toddler really, carries a saucer-sized headload of stone chips. The shot is held long enough to register the solemn pleasure with which the family responds to the child’s efforts, and the sequence glows with what is best described as love—even though we are witnessing a manifestly early debut into a life of hard labor.

At PS1 images from Snow, Hura’s rendering of winter in Kashmir, are placed almost directly opposite those from The song of sparrows in a hundred days of summer. If only weather connected the two series, this would have been a predictable juxtaposition. But both are also marked by a spare approach to composition and an uncommon attention to quotidian details—and neither features scribbled notes. This absence of annotations is effective in the context of central India, forcing us to look closely and reflect on the circumstances in which people live, which in themselves speak lucidly to the broader political failings of Indian democracy. But it makes for an unexpected tension in Kashmir, which has been the site of an armed insurrection against the Indian state for more than thirty-five years. 

Snow only fleetingly gestures at the conflict, most memorably in the image of a young boy holding a tightly-packed snowball behind his back—a reference perhaps to stone-throwing protests—and, more elliptically, in pictures of blood from a sacrificial lamb trickling through the snow. Instead, in what seems like a nod toward the elephant in the room, a stack of four old-style television monitors play looped clips from Indian news broadcasts and from Bollywood films depicting Kashmir. These sounds fill large sections of the gallery, but the provocation—about how propaganda shapes perceptions of Kashmir—is at once too didactic and too obscure. One walks away from Snow feeling that its pieces still need to be moved into their natural place.

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A self-taught photographer, Hura turned to the medium in a moment of extreme vulnerability, not long after his mother was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and hospitalized—he had just turned seventeen. Making pictures became a way of digging himself out of that situation: “I took to photography as therapy,” he said in an interview.

Hura also began to ask difficult questions about the conventions of social realist photography from quite early on. He has articulated his discomfort with the social chasm that separates him from many of the people he photographs, and about what happens to the pictures—who sees it, where, and how. Other photographers have felt similar doubts, but for Hura the questions have proved especially invigorating. Over the past decade, for instance, he has taken a quiet but significant move inward. The photobook Life is Elsewhere (2015) is, in effect, a fragmented diary, with notes and letters and images of friends, possible lovers, frequently spectral landscapes, and most coruscating, his mother—her face reflecting years of illness and constant medication. (“I hate photography,” one scribble reads. “Or no, maybe it is more of a love-hate relationship.”) The book’s companion volume, Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018), is more centered on Ma, her beloved and by-now ailing dog Elsa, a home stained by neglect, and the half-materialized figure of Hura’s father.

“My work [is] now starting to melt into sound, video and text,” Hura has written. “And my constant shift from one to the other is also helping me constantly break down and rebuild the photographer I am.” There is a conscious effort to return to the point from where he started—to reexperience “chance,” as he says—and this has inevitably led to a fresh turn in his work. 

Looming over it all is a sense that the world is increasingly beleaguered by the ceaseless flow of images, especially through social media. In the unsettling, almost reckless mashup at the end of the video of The Lost Head & the Bird, Hura experiments with throwing the meaning of his own work into question. Eleven other variations of it playing at PS1, with only tiny shifts across each iteration, like a game of whispers. You’re probably not meant to sit through all of them, but the existence of twelve variants seems to be the point. We are asked to replace belief with doubt, and acknowledge the proposition that truth is “within a range, rather than a binary.” 

As a response to the growing anarchy of the image world, Hura’s polemic does not make itself clear. By absorbing—rather than resisting—chaos, it instead seems like a troubling abdication. But the video may well be another stage in a deeper exploration. For in his constant urge to renew himself, Hura comes across as an artist committed to tilling hard ground. The pressure of the plough, he knows, loosens other valuable things: the grubs, insects, and worms that in turn enrich the earth. 

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An entire room at PS1 is dedicated to Hura’s drawing and painting. After the disquiet provoked by earlier displays, the whimsy of the work here, its easy wit and bright colors, provides an unexpected release. The themes, for the most part, are familial: his mother and father appear frequently—even together, in the poignant Mother and father dreaming in their sleep (2023)— as do his grandfather and grandmother, and various uncles, friends, and animals. In School Choir (2023), bright-eyed boys and girls in pink shirts gather to sing, the soft pastels evoking their cheeky vitality. This is a “more elastic” depiction, as Hura has put it, of a personal story that he previously revealed in troubling shards.

In the middle of the room, a set of ten cartons are arranged in varying stages of being open, closed, or folded. Their cardboard surfaces are profusely and delicately illustrated, with narratives that mix personal anecdotes with wider political events—Hura’s ironic comment on the idea of “unpacking” a story. The School shows Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the most influential Dalit leader; The Bus depicts Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott; The Olive Tree, featuring Yasser Arafat, alludes to the displacement of the Palestinian people. The more recent past finds its way in, too, in Protest, which includes scenes of demonstrations in Dhaka, Kathmandu, Lahore, Soweto, and New Delhi, where policemen rain down tall batons on students. 

Turning away from all this, one is taken up short by a screen placed in a corner. It plays Bittersweet (2019) a fourteen-minute video Hura made about his mother over a period of ten years. Mixing moving images with stills, many of them from his photobooks, it addresses her struggle with schizophrenia and her relationship with Elsa and others who flit in and out of her life—stray pups, insects, a transitory husband, and her son. In a brief voiceover Hura speaks about their early years of hiding, “she out of paranoia, and I out of embarrassment and anger at what she had become.” There is something cathartic about this unexpectedly personal encounter at what seems to be the end of the show (which is, I note a little too late, called Mother). When the film reprises images we have seen before—a hand, a silhouette, a flower, the opaque glow of Elsa’s eye—they no longer evoke feral discomfort. In its place is a kind of quiet triumph.