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Experimenter presents Ghosts in My Sleep, Sohrab Hura’s (b.1981 lives and works in New Delhi, India) solo at Experimenter – Colaba. The exhibition takes its title from a new body of work comprising works on paper made with gouache. Alongside these small paintings, the ongoing pastel drawings from Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed, the short film Bittersweet as well as other image and sound notations dispersed across the gallery underscore Hura’s ongoing engagement with the ‘image’.
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Sohrab Hura, My grandfather's ghost in Chinsurah – 1980’s, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Memories of my mother waiting, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Howrah bridge, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, 10:11, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Mother, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Assembly, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, The last goodbye, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Didu, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Swimming lessons in Varanasi on winter mornings, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Fish food, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Mother's garden, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Mother, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Summer shade, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Neighbour, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Dad joke, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Meeting A after many years, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, The afternoon that changed everything, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Evening tea, 2023
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While photography marked his beginnings and has been integral to the core of his practice, subsequent shifts towards experimentation with the moving image and sound and now drawing and painting are simply Hura continuing to engage with a constantly shifting image world. Perhaps this shift to ‘trying to work more with his hands’ is also an existential attempt at finding something ‘more real’ at a time when the screen has become the primary interface to determine what is real or not
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While photography marked his beginnings and has been integral to the core of his practice, subsequent shifts towards experimentation with the moving image and sound and now drawing and painting are simply Hura continuing to engage with a constantly shifting image world. Perhaps this shift to ‘trying to work more with his hands’ is also an existential attempt at finding something ‘more real’ at a time when the screen has become the primary interface to determine what is real or not
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Sohrab Hura, A memory, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, 'My Dear Kuttichathan', 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Sunset on Rabbit Island, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Last October, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Pukur, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Lizard in the backyard, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Sixteen, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Winter sun, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Field of horses, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Twenty-six, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Night trek (Rainy night), 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Night trek (Starry night), 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Mother’s stories, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Secret beach, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, View, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Spring, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Friend at work, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, After office hours, 2023
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These new ‘broken images’ that he feels he trusts more and more, carry with them undercurrents similar to his early photographic works that had a tendency to reflect upon every day ordinariness of love, joy, relationships and the familial. His immediate space also includes animals while the significance of title texts, tempering the tone of the images, creates a parallel between this body of work with the format of a photo book.
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Sohrab Hura, Winter mornings with P, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, A night with A, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Green room, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Morning, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Picnic, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Wound, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Last day of summer, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Nine, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Zanzibar, Siem Reap - 2007, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, November evenings in Delhi, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Dessert, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Tremors , 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Far from the madding crowd, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Delhi - December 2019, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Father and son, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, First time father, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Caught red handed, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, 1995, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Evening walk, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Honeymoon, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, New year, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, School days, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Moonlight, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Full moon night in Karaikal, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Red room, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Last night, 2023
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“Sometime in the eighties when I was making one of my annual holiday visits to my grandmother in Chinsurah – the place where I’d been born, a silhouette of a tall figure would enter the room almost every other night when the whole village was asleep. I’d wake up to this feeling of movement around the bed and from slivers of vision leaking through my pressed eyelids I’d see a shape standing by my bedside; almost leaning into me as if to have a closer look. Scared, I’d want to immediately reach beside me and wake my mother up but then I’d continue to pretend to be asleep with my eyes shut until the air around me was empty again. I must have been seven or eight years old and I had never really met my grandfather. He had passed when I was six months old. My mother had told me stories of him right through my childhood; how he had disappeared when he was ten and the rumours of the life that he had lived abroad, him re-connecting with his family when he was in his twenties, him and the crazy garden that was visited by everyone in the village and so on and so forth. The story of my life always seemed to begin with him. Now that I look back at the events of that year after so many decades, I’m not completely sure if those were dreams or actual occurrences. — Sohrab Hura
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Sohrab Hura, The last light, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, French Bread, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, A movie, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Everyday news, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, That uncle who keeps butt dialing, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, There was a reason for shutting the door, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Television in the 90’s, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Everyone’s got to stop sending me this meme, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Office chair, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, A photograph, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, And I carried on walking, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, The phone call, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Marc had decided to get us some chips, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Bengali photographer , 2023
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Sohrab Hura, The story of my life, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, A memory of my mother waiting for my father to return , 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Dry grass, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Negative, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Nightfall in Jahanpanah forest, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Guest, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Secret meeting, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Youngest sibling, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Mother and father dreaming in their sleep, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, The rock in her hand, 2023
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Sohrab Hura, Monsoon evenings on Rabbit island, 2023
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Ghosts in My Sleep looks back to the past. If I imagine that one can look at life being like a bucket - a definite roundish shape with depth, a vessel meant to hold within, a container that lends its shape to the liquid it holds - then with this work I’m interested in the leakages of fuzzy memory that might trickle out of the little cracks, the fictitious exaggerations that might spill when that bucket is disturbed and the trail of stains of those leakages and spills left behind on the floor as you carry this leaky bucket. Imagine this work as a cluster of fragments; of unexplained events from the past, of dreams, of unresolved memories, of regrets, of secrets, of loss, of choices made, of opportunities lost, of heartbreaks, of expectations and all those other registers that don’t always count in the immediate make-up of life. The more I look back into my past, the more elastic my readings of those events seem to become. I’m curious to see where this amalgamation of the uncertainty of events and the elasticity of time leads to, and if it can help me hold on to a part of my life that I’m afraid I’m losing touch with, for just a little bit longer.” – Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura (b.1981; lives and works in New Delhi, India) works with drawings, film, photographs, sound and text that are part of his fluid relationship with the ‘Image’ and attempts at questioning a constantly shifting world and his own place within it. Family and illness form the heart of the photobooks Life Is Elsewhere and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!, everyday ordinariness is explored with pastel drawings in Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed, while the experimental film The Lost Head & The Bird looks directly at the infrastructure of power, systems and the role of story-telling within it. Hura 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.” The film The Coast (2020) premiered at Berlinale 2021 while Bittersweet (2019) was awarded the Principal Prize of the International Jury at the 66th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2020. The Lost Head & The Bird (2017) had previously won the NRW Award at the 64th 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 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award of the Year in 2019. The exhibition Growing Like A Tree (2021) opened in January 2021 at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai, marking his inaugural curatorial project. This exhibition underwent a series of six, slow transformations, culminating in its second iteration – Growing Like A Tree: Static In The Air, in September 2021. His work can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Ishara Art Foundation (Dubai), KNMA (New Delhi), Cincinnati Art Museum (Cincinnati) and other private and public collections.
Sohrab Hura | Ghosts in My Sleep
Current viewing_room