The Coast (2019) blurs the line between documentary and fiction bringing into question whose truth is being told, who sets the narrative – and for what purpose? Power is firmly in the corner of the one who makes the narratives today. Using the coastline as a metaphor, the photographs veer from violent scenes to the everyday absurdity of life – the viewer never sure of what is real and what is not. The character of an ‘idiot photographer’ also makes an appearance in self reference as Hura is all too aware of his own role in the violence and manipulation of image making today. This hyperreal chaos is set against a new film also titled The Coast (2020) where visuals of bathers in the sea in the dark of the night reflect the desire for conquest over the waves.

The sound notation book A Proposition for Departure is a blueprint of my experiments with the relationship between images and sound. It forms an emotional map that I began to draw as an experiment, to work with an online synthesizer that helped me scan points within the images and turn the whiter points into higher frequencies of sound at the octaves and in scales that I decided on. The images I scanned also at times required specific alterations and manipulations to produce the desired flow of sound frequencies. I wanted to try and extract sounds that would reflect a state of being that I had felt at the time of making the image. In the end eight sound extractions out of eight images that are part of the show, were stitched together to form a three movement sound piece, a sort of a sonata, that fills up the gallery space. While I desired for the freedom to pull away from the visible and tangible starting form of images as we saw and acknowledged them, it remained important to me that the logic in the final composition created remained anchored in the core meaning and reason why those images were created in the first place. The eight images were consciously selected, such that if the composition was to be broken up into the individual extractions and then translated back to the form of the starting images that those extractions were made from, and laid out in a sequence similar to the one that the sounds had put together in, the movement within this newly derived sequence of retransformed images would be an inverse of the movement that exists within the structure of the book ‘Life is Elsewhere’.

Land of a Thousand Struggles (2005-06) was made by Hura immediately after finishing his university studies when he embarked on a fifty-day long bus journey across the north Indian rural belt with his university professor Jean Dreze and others from civil society who were part of the Right to Food movement. The journey was a final push to demand for the enactment of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) which eventually became the biggest social security measure undertaken by any government anywhere at the time, with a focus to provide the right to employment with dignity.