Sohrab Hura’s art is so universally relatable that he won a very prestigious prize for it

Earlier this year, in frigid New York, I witnessed Hura’s series Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed, comprising slice-of-life frames in soft pastels on paper that allow him to mix and match emotions. There is humour, satire, grief, and, at times, scenes that he just ‘lets be.’ But it’s always the captions he adds, longhand, that lend the kind of tongue-in-cheek flavour to his art that Gen Z salivates for. See, for instance, how the painting of a forlorn boy wedged between two couples making out is anointed ‘Saturday Night, 2022’. Another featuring a tiny fist reaching out from between two airplane seats to pluck a hair from the leg of a fellow passenger is presciently titled ‘Delhi to New York, all sixteen hours of it, 2023’. There’s a boy on the commode whose privacy is compromised with a birthday cake christened ‘The story of my life, 2023’. With gouache, Hura’s art takes a more surrealist vein. Ghosts in My Sleep, for example, is named for the silhouette of his late grandfather that would hover over his cot in his grandmother’s Chinsurah home.

‘Stranger Things Season 4 Episode 1, 2023’

‘A sudden bout of love, just before bath, 2022’

For Hura, shuffling between lens and paper is like “tuning the radio through different channels. Sometimes we might want the news, at other times we might want to listen to music.” His pastel paintings herald a “softer era” in his oeuvre, a practice he has found to be more “broken” than photography. Drawing instils the “importance of glitches in an increasingly sanitised and perfect world of images.” He needs drawing, Hura tells me. For now, at least. “I’m living with the contradiction of needing the softness of the pastels to get by (effects of long Covid and caretaking hinder his travels for his film work) and the responsibility of witnessing a livestreamed genocide.”

‘The bus screeched to a halt and I made a mad dash to the toilet at the far end of the stop but, 2023’

‘They ran out of milk so Gupta uncle and Vicky rushed to Mother Dairy, 2023’

Ultimately, Sohrab Hura asks that we consider his oeuvre and his role more mutably. He is many things. Documentarian, surrealist, satirist. Cartoonist, even. Above all, he is a critic. He is currently working on two photo books, Snow and The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer, the latter based on his work in Pati. He continues making moving images on his walks in Delhi as he convalesces from his lung damage, whilst drawing to stay close to the family he cares for. Like the range of characters in his paintings, he, too, contains multitudes.