Catalogue > At random

‘The physical coastline becomes a metaphor for a ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.’ – Sohrab Hura The most recent film The Coast was filmed in the dark of the night during religious festivities in a sea side village in South India where millions of people throng to participate in religious festivities to celebrate Kali, the mytholoigical Goddess of death and destruction, for a week every year. These devotees transform into mythical creatures, celestial beings and even characters from every day life and enter a frenzied state of trance in that celebration after which they are carried to the sea in a state of exhaustion to wash off those masquerades. This film stretches the end of the book and the photographic installation also titled The Coast (Large Gallery I). The margin between land and water becomes a point of release beyond which characters experience fear, surprise, anger, sadness, trust, anticipation, excitement, contempt but also rapture. In this sequel to The Head & The Bird (Large Gallery I), Hura uses the metaphor of the washing away of the masquerade as a hope for the removal of the different masks that society wears to commit and justify their actions. Many of his later works have looked at the mask as a metaphor to make social and political comments. Here he looks at the masks worn by society where as in Snow (Bel étage) the mask is his own - the mask of denial. In this film we begin with seeing groups of people going into the sea almost as if to conquer the waves that crash upon them. At the same time frenzied rituals are at play on land. A drone like hypnotic sound oscillates between the ears of the audience. During the festivities Hura had met a musician playing the Urumi – a traditional percussion drum in Tamil Nadu – whose skin heads are made of buffalo skin. To be able to listen to the sound of skin, the artist had asked if he could record the musician rubbing the drum stick against the taut skin instead of beating it. The tense fight with the sea eventually gives way to a more gentle embracing of the sea. In the film the sea holds hope of a more optimistic future – one that is led not by male protagonists. The continuous crashing of the waves on land makes the edges and tipping points more blurry making visible that the overlaps of land and water and other intersectionalities are always in flux. The sea asks for a different kind of osmosis and transformation, the sea asks for embracing and not colliding.

Sohrab Hura (b.1981) is a photographer and filmmaker. His work lies at the intersection of Film, Photographs, Sound and Text. By constantly experimenting with form and using a journal like approach, many of his works attempt to question a constantly shifting world and his own place within it. Some of his recent solo and group exhibitions include Spill (Huis Marseille voor Fotografie, 2021)The Coast (Liverpool Biennial 2021), Videonale (Kunstmuseum Bonn 2021, 2019), Spill (Experimenter, India 2020), Companion Pieces: New Photography (The Museum of Modern Art, 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). His films have been widely shown in international film festivals. 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 Aperture - Paris Photo PhotoBook of the Year Award 2019 and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! was shortlisted for the same award in 2018. 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 Static In The Air opened at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai over six slow transformations in September 2021. In 2022 Hura will be the focus of a profile at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival for his films that lie at the intersection of the still and moving images. His work can be found in the permanent collections of MoMA (New York), Ishara Art Foundation, Cincinnati Art Museum and other private and public collections. Hura lives and works in New Delhi, India.