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Spill is an unfolding of Sohrab Hura’s 15-year practice marked by constant probing of the medium of image making. Hura’s process may be viewed like a complex system of synaptic connections, that allow for transmissions back and forth between interests that are central to his practice.
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The Lost Head & The Bird
A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.
‘I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don’t stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.’
Artist: Sohrab Hura | Music: Performed live by Hannes d’Hoine (Electronic) & Sjoerd Bruil (Guitar). Performance curated and produced by Wendy Marijnissen / Bending The Frame
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The Lost Head & The Bird
Single channel video with sound in variable loop, 10 min 13 sec. Edition of 5 plus 1 artist's proof. 2016 - 2019 -
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-2019
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The Coast
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.
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The Coast
Single channel video, two channel audio. 17 min 27 sec, Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proof. 2020 -
A Proposition for Departure
Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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A Proposition for Departure
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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Sohrab Hura, A Proposition for Departure. Archival pigment prints. Suite of 9. Each 9 7/8 x 14 5/8 in | 25.1 x 37.2 cm. Sound map: 11.7 x 16.5 in. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2017
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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’.
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Bittersweet
Single channel video, two channel audio, 13 min 48 sec. Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs, 2019 -
Midnight studies & a self portrait
Completed during the middle years of my working on Life is Elsewhere when I had started to question my relationship to photography and was overwhelmed by doubts that came along with it, this short series of work became a point of relief that helped me continue to build the larger and separate work Life is Elsewhere. The search for a self portrait, along the river at the time of midnight, given that I was an insomniac at the time, allowed me to step back from the heaviness of photographing at home as well as the formality of the kind of photography I had experienced until then. From a much faster paced workings at home and breaking out of it, it was my first experience in slowness and I realized the possibilities of movement within photography. I was also able to work loosely and also infuse in just a little bit of humour in the clues that I left behind for the viewer. So which is the Self Portrait and what are the 14 midnight studies in the work? Ever since I have enjoyed leaving behind, in many of my works, clues and hints, for people who find them to unravel layers that might go beyond the initial reading of the work.
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Land of a Thousand Struggles
Sohrab Hura, Land of a Thousand Struggles. Matt photograph paper with text, photographs of variable dimensions, archival tape | Suite of 22: 12 frames: 20.5 x 14.5 in & 10 frames: 14 x 19 in | Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2005-2006
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Land of a Thousand of Struggles
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.
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Pati
Single channel video, two channel audio 11 min 48 sec. Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs, 2010/2020 -
Scramble
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Sohrab Hura, Scramble. Archival pigment prints on dibond, suite of 3 | 2 prints: 10 x 7 1/2 in each / 25.4 x 19.1 cm each & 1 print: 10 x 15 in / 25.4 x 38.1 | Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2020
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Sohrab Hura, Scramble. Archival pigment prints on dibond, suite of 3 | 2 prints: 10 x 7 1/2 in each / 25.4 x 19.1 cm each & 1 print: 10 x 15 in / 25.4 x 38.1 | Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2020
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Sohrab Hura, Scramble. Archival pigment prints on dibond, suite of 3 | 2 prints: 10 x 7 1/2 in each / 25.4 x 19.1 cm each & 1 print: 10 x 15 in / 25.4 x 38.1 | Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2020
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Spill
Sohrab Hura, Spill. Archival pigment print. 12 1/2 x 9 in / 31.8 x 22.9 cm. Edition of 6 plus 2 artist's proofs. 2014
Sohrab Hura | Spill
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