A tiny orange triangle flickers on the right-hand corner of the seemingly blank screen. It could be a petal. It could be the golden peak of a snow-capped mountain touched by the sun’s first rays. After a seemingly interminable wait, minuscule human, ovine and canine phantoms materialise for a moment and evaporate. Quite as unexpectedly, the grey screen turns into a vivid green forested mountain slope, and things fall into perspective.
This is Sohrab Hura’s new film Disappeared. It is part of his exhibition of paintings titled The Forest, which is being shown for the first time at Calcutta’s Experimenter-Ballygunge Place till January 3, 2026. Hura, who is a full member of Magnum Photos and has a master’s in economics, is concurrently holding an exhibition titled A Winter Summer at Alipore Museum till December 6. This will include his photographs of a snow-bound Kashmir and a bone-dry village in Madhya Pradesh.
This crop of paintings by Hura is all the more interesting as he is identified as a photographer. In an interview with The Telegraph, the 44-year-old says he was never formally trained as an artist but he has memories of his mother painting and making designs on a tablecloth with wool. Hura sketched a lot too. When he was 10 or 12, his father took him to a “professional” who ran a gallery. He looked at the sketches and asked Hura if he had a “perspective”. Confounded, Hura never sketched thereafter. Not till he was 40.
3 PM on a Sunday in May and Self-portrait with new hair
He draws to have “fun”. “It reminds me of my photography from earlier years. Poking fun,” says Hura. In the postscript of his book Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed based on his paintings, Hura elaborates: “In June 2022, I was trying to recover from the long-term effects of lung damage caused by Covid-19. Unable to take photographs the way I used to, I discovered drawing… Maybe it was the long-forgotten sense of tenderness I discovered in sculpting images into existence with soft pastels, a slowness that reminded me of my early years in photography, when there was more time to meander…”
These works in pastel, gouache and oil paint in electric Fauvist hues have, at first glance, the ingenuous quality of children’s drawings, noticeably in The Watcher — a feline.
Hura used YouTube for painting lessons. Yet, built up as these are on memes (Hura projects himself as a bald head meme), memories of television watching, social media algorithms, social and political commentary, and satire (a man being lynched, Putin and Kim Jong Un toasting each other), they capture the intimacy of political refugees and the despair of private moments — a woman grieving by the bedside of an ill man. They also turn ordinary people into larger-than-life luminous beings.
Hura’s vision seems to zoom in (2.43am — the fattened mosquito on a man’s lip) and out as in the starry starry night of The view from my window (Night). As in his photographs, we catch occasional glimpses of his mother and the dog. These works are “hybrids”, like Hura — a person who is “part of a generation that speaks to the world”.
His is a “much larger world” and his “sensibility is much more open”. Hierarchies don’t exist. It’s a jolly gallimaufry. “I am trying to flatten everything,” he says. This world is a retreat for him — like the forest near his house is a “metaphor for any place to find solace in”.
When told that his work had echoes of the recent paintings of David Hockney, James Ensor and even Gond art, Hura responds: “No reference at all from my end but the reading of it by others is always interesting to me. I am trying to do whatever I can technically.”
Through these drawings, Hura seeks to decelerate the frenetic pace at which the world moves and restore the tactile pleasures so as to hook viewers with a fleeting attention span.
In his photographs, Hura visits another hyper-arid village in Madhya Pradesh, similar to the one he photographed during a bus journey in 2005-2006 across north India with his professor Jean Drèze for a grassroots movement. A hand-held mirror catches the blinding sun in one of his frames. The grit is palpable. Human presence is marginal.
“Essentially, I’m interested in the malleability of the image. When I was making photographs, I was trying to embrace all kinds of photography,” says Hura. He turns Kashmir into a white “paradise” where he makes visible the undercurrents of anger once the blanket of ice starts melting — women form a chain as a mark of protest, and the stump of a torch smoulders on the ground. And given the recent Delhi blast, these photographs become more fraught. He says, “The snow is a metaphor for something. Photographic work has become metaphorical. Earlier it was direct.”