10 October 2024– 17 February 17 2025

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Queens, NY 11101

momaps1.org

Sohrab Hura: Mother

The first U.S. survey of the artist Sohrab Hura (Indian, b. 1981) includes photographs, text, film, drawing, and painting from the last twenty years of his disparate practice, exploring themes of colonialism, partition, and socio-political change.

Sohrab Hura: Mother navigates, and at times captures the interplay between personal experience and broader systemic issues. The artist’s mother has been the subject of three previously self-published books, and appears throughout this presentation. The intimate portrayal of her struggles with acute schizophrenia serves as an uncomfortable metaphor for the erratic and explosive state of contemporary Indian society.

The project The Coast (2019) is a multifaceted exploration focusing on India's coastline as a focal point for examining the dynamic shifts in the nation's political landscape. In 2013, Hura began documenting an annual festival in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India, in which participants embody various characters based on their prayers for the year ahead. Part of a larger body of work that also includes a film and artist book, the photographs depict the shifting states of joy, anger, trust, and contempt that belie the celebration. Hura emphasizes the coastline as a “metaphor for ruptured piece of skin barely holding together a volatile state of being ready to explode.” the project posits the coastline of Tamil Nadu as a border between not only land and sea, but fact and fiction, in which meaning continues to shift with the tides of context.

Hura’s work stands not merely as a reflection, but as a powerful catalyst for conversation surrounding the complexities of identity, history, and place in an increasingly fragmented world.

Sohrab Hura, The Coast, 2013-19