An Excuse to Touch the World: Sohrab Hura on His Multimedia Practice

Renowned for his lens-based work, artist Sohrab Hura has recently captured remarkable everyday moments in a new series of drawings and paintings. On the occasion of his first US survey, Mother, on view at MoMA PS1 through February 17, we discuss his decision to step away from the camera and instead render scenes in pastel and gouache that venture where his lens cannot. Hura’s oeuvre shares an approach in playful and intriguing perspectives, angles, humor, discomfort, and political concerns. However, his newest bodies of work, Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed and Timelines, depict scenes both real and imagined. Our conversation traces individual moments and gestures in Hura’s work to unpack his interdisciplinary concerns around the ethics of image-making as a documentary act.

Join us on January 13 for a special Modern Mondays screening of a selection of Hura’s works, followed by a conversation with the artist.
—Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, MoMA PS1

Ruba Katrib: In the early 2000s, as part of your studies, you traveled as a budding hybrid economist-photographer-campaigner to a rural region of connected self-governing villages in Central India, with the purpose of educating people about labor reforms. Knowing this backstory, the connection between economics and photography comes to the surface in a work like Pati (2010/2020), which emerged from the impact of divestment and loss of industry on everyday people there.

Sohrab Hura: I thought I would study development economics to make a difference. Somehow, economics turned out to be all numbers and felt very cold, and I was quite disappointed by it.

Still, those are the years of photography when it felt like photographs or images had a certain value in making a difference. It gave me the motivation to go to places that I might not have gone to otherwise.

I think there was a moment of realization that photography was just an excuse to touch the world, which seemed to be far off otherwise. At that moment, I was also realizing the power of who holds the camera. This made me want to look inwards in my own life, at my mum. I realized it was much easier for me to photograph someone else’s mother than my own.

RK: Is that how you dealt with the power of the photographer, by getting closer to your subjects or to what you’re documenting? Does that relate to your approach to drawing?

SH: I took to drawing in the pandemic because I got COVID. Lung damage interrupted my process of photographing, which had always involved traveling and going out. For a year and a half, I just wasn’t able to do any of it. I think recently, it stopped feeling like photography could offer catharsis to me.

I was also interested in trying to look for a softer kind of an image, also something more broken. I think a lot of my colleagues seem to be experimenting with AI and other technologies, and I felt the opposite: I wanted to touch something because I was tired of the screen.

When I started to draw at this point in my life, the first reaction was, why hadn’t I been doing this for the last 20 years? Then I realized I had to have those 20 years of going out, meeting people, experiencing life in a certain sense, to be able to learn and unlearn how I would approach subjects in drawing.

RK: In the series Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed (2022–24), on view in the exhibition, your drawings include memes, people watching TV, a funeral, your parents, a nightscape, dancing, a cut hand bleeding in the sink. How do you select these scenes to depict?

SH: I find my approach quite connected to photography, not just in terms of the angles and things, but also in the way they’re being stitched together in layout on the wall or the book that I’ve made. Photography for me has always been a lot more than just the photographs: it’s logic, it’s a way of seeing the world. It’s a way of building something up. These images are quite a spillover, in some ways, of photography into a different frequency.

These drawings, they’re like my algorithm. In my Instagram feed for example, I will have my own photographs, other people’s photographs, film stills, reels, memes. I think it’s a new way of communicating, a new infrastructure of sharing. In a way, it’s a bit like looking at an image somewhere and feeling: that is me, I can relate to it. In a way, I wanted to collect all these different moments to be able to kind of condense it to my being.

RK: It’s interesting to hear you talking about the layout like an Instagram feed because these drawings become almost like news items, or an archive of moments in time. In the acrylic paintings on cardboard boxes Timelines (Delhi, Mother, Sheila, The Bus, The School, The Olive Tree, Bees, Protest, and Mail) (2024–ongoing), which were made for the exhibition, historic moments and world events are mixed in with the everyday. There’s certainly a focus put on news items, including representation of a newspaper, interweaving what could be considered major and minor stories. The cardboard boxes can be opened or closed, shown on different sides with some parts obstructed, some parts revealed. You’re breaking away from the idea of linear narrative of history, and making it multidimensional. There are also things that you probably could never have photographed, too, improbable scenarios or historic moments that you weren’t alive for or couldn’t have witnessed, which now merge together without hierarchy.

SH: The last two years have been so much fun, to be doing drawings and to get rid of the burden of photography that I felt I had only dumped on myself—that burden of purposeWith drawing I started to again meander while working, as I used to, in the early years, when I had started learning photography. And somehow, eventually, I got pulled back into that space with the work Timelines. Here, I’m looking more specifically at how the timelines of stories can change the stories themselves, like how the boxes can be folded inside out and different combinations can be made. In a way, it connects to some of my other works, like the film The Lost Head and the Bird (2019), in terms of looking at the connection between power and storytelling.

RK: What other techniques or themes do you see spanning your work across media?

SH: I think a lot of my work is really about recognizing patterns. When I’m editing the work of other people, I lay out the entire archive on the floor and walk around it to pull out various patterns. Then you realize how malleable an archive is. A lot of my works might seem different in terms of the style and composition from one another. But my language is more in the way I was putting things together, not so much in aesthetics. I’m an editor in the end. I think that’s my main work. Looking at the PS1 show, the work, for me, is the space. It’s the exhibition. It’s not just the photographs or the paintings or the films. The best thing about having the exhibition at PS1 is that I could really be me. I’m most excited about having all these different parts of my work together, to be able to show these different layers of my practice. I think it’s the closest reflection of my relationship with the image.

Sohrab Hura: Mother is on view at MoMA PS1 through February 17, 2025.