Experimenter presents Sweet Life, Sohrab Hura’s first solo at the gallery. The exhibition offers an insight into the deeply poetic and personal journey of Hura’s relationships within his family and outside. Sweet Life opens on September 9 and will continue to be on view until November 10 2017.
Sweet Life, shows Hura’s project Life Is Elsewhere, where he focuses on intimate family life, particularly the relationship to his mother who was diagnosed with acute Paranoid Schizophrenia. What began as a way to escape his family situation, in time, turned into a method of confronting the realities at home. Sweet Life opens a window into the artist’s life, his need to experience the beauty and precariousness of existence and make sense of the world around him, and then circles back towards home and the relationship between him, his mother and her dog Elsa. Photographed over a period of ten years, it is a search for meaning and closure with the artist questioning, and in time, discovering the banalities of everyday life at home.
At the exhibition Hura employs photography, wall drawings, notes as well as sound extractions to register in the viewers’ mind an intense sense of belonging as well as estrangement, a reflection on what it means to be suddenly left without an anchor. Their initial years were spent hiding from the world. Hers out of paranoia and Hura’s out of embarrassment and anger at who she had become. Hura’s gaze in the photographs reflect as a beautiful ode to the touching relationship between him and his mother as a nuanced understanding of personal loss.
At the core of Hura’s practice resides the photographic image, but he is not limited by it and his work also encompasses text, moving image, and sound. Restless and unwilling to be bound down by expectations that one has of the idea of an image, Hura constantly breaks and rebuilds his process to seek new relationships with it.
Life is Elsewhere is a journal of Hura’s life, his family, his love, his friends, his travels, his sheer need to experience all that is about to disappear and so in a way he attempts to connect his own life with the world that he sees with a hope to find his reality in it. It emerges as a register of contradictions, of doubts and understandings and of laughter and forgetting in which Hura is trying to constantly question himself by simply documenting the broken fragments of his life which might seem completely disconnected to one another on their own on first encounter. In time though the journey seems to perhaps leads to a reconciliation with his own life.
