Sohrab Hura’s Art of Ambiguity Has Won Him Global Recognition

How does it feel to have your work recognised for its ability to capture the surreality of contemporary life?

I am deeply touched that the jury found something meaningful in my practice. My journey began with photography, and everything else—film, drawing, or whatever medium I have been curious about—feels like an extension of that initial impulse. Each medium adds a new layer rather than being a departure. For instance, I was able to use the sequence I had made for my first book, Life is Elsewhere, to make my short film, Bittersweet. And from that film format, I was able to draw out my next book, Look It’s getting Sunny Outside!!!

In between, I scanned images from the first book to turn them into notes of sound, which I stitched together to create a three-movement sound piece, A Proposition For Departure—a soundtrack for Bittersweet. This interconnection in my work process becomes clearer as and when there is a back and forth movement between different mediums. So, an acknowledgment like this reaffirms for me that it is okay to work in an in-between space.

The jury applauded your practice across photography, film, and painting. How do you find your voice across these different mediums, and do they feed into each other to shape your approach to storytelling?

I have always been drawn to stories and, more importantly, to how I want to tell them. The medium emerges organically from the story itself. If I were to offer a simple analogy, it is like cooking. I might want to cook a specific dish, but if I pause to think about whom I am cooking for, I might tweak the recipe, or even the form, to suit that person’s taste. And sometimes, I take leftovers from yesterday and transform them into a new dish. Creating work is much like that—like the everyday, ordinary act of cooking and eating. The mediums are just ingredients.

What truly matters is what I am making and for whom. It is also a happy coincidence that this prize comes from a Dutch institution. I was obsessed with football as a teenager: I read about Johan Cruyff and the philosophy of Total Football. Maybe art-making can be like that too: free-flowing and unfettered, like life itself.

Your practice often blurs the lines between documentary and dream, essay and encounter. How do these overlapping approaches shape your visual language?

What others might perceive as dreamlike often feels quite ordinary to me. I try to create enough space in my work for viewers to have the motivation to linger, to look longer, and perhaps peel back additional layers of meaning on their own. Today, we are conditioned to seek instant answers, often in binaries: yes or no. But the world does not work like that.

I feel that this way of understanding the world makes us look at the world in silos. But what makes the world move are systems that have often been so deliberately complicated that it isn’t easy to look at all the interconnections. We are surrounded by interlinked systems: complex, overlapping, and often intentionally opaque.

To give an example: consider the Prison Industrial Complex in the US, where African Americans disproportionately represent the prison population. Without understanding the system behind it, it is easy to draw inaccurate conclusions determined by racism. It might also leave space for someone to make the inaccurate, even biased, inference that it is a reflection of the community’s fault. But an understanding of the industrial complex system of prison generates an entirely different story of power dynamics.

Now, think about the systems of power in our own part of the world. They are similar to the caste, religion, and power structures we have in India; it is smoke and mirrors everywhere. We can understand these complexities if we stay curious. But easy answers are given to us to blunt curiosity. My work tries to cajole back that curiosity, offering just enough to sustain the viewer’s attention—maybe that ambivalence can be renamed as “surreal”.

When your work emerges from deep personal experience, do you think it is imperative to maintain critical distance without losing the intimacy that lends it emotional intensity?

When I mentor younger artists, I often ask them to close their eyes and feel the space around them. The room may seem different from how they last saw it. Perhaps, they stumble upon a chair out of place, step on a forgotten coin, or feel the texture of the wall under their fingers. When they open their eyes, the act of seeing is transformed.

Then I request them to close their eyes, then to look again, and repeat the process. I work in a similar rhythm, intuitively creating material, editing with precision, then returning to intuitive gestures again. This loop continues until I arrive at some kind of closure. It is a process of oscillation between intimacy and critical distance.

The jury noted your engagement with South Asia’s contradictions. How has the region’s sociopolitical landscape influenced your work?

To be honest, I am more interested in my immediate surroundings than in being defined by my “Indianness” or “South Asianness”. These labels are far too vast for any one experience to be represented. It makes more sense for me to acknowledge the specific people and the specific moments that have shaped how I see the world. For instance, meeting people involved in the Right to Food campaign in 2005, just after completing my master’s in economics at the Delhi School of Economics, profoundly influenced me; it was a way to understand how society operates. Even today that experience informs my work, if it is not a direct reference to it.

As a child I would be teased and bullied for my mixed background: Bengali mother, Punjabi father. I was not easily identifiable to others, and it made me feel (up)rooted, inhabiting an in-between space. That probably explains why I prefer to unsettle meanings rather than to reinforce them in my work. So, it could be said, I do not really consider meaning to be shaped by the larger South Asian or even Indian context since I am just a cog in a wheel. It is just about ordinary chores for me, as I mentioned earlier.

With exhibitions at MoMA PS1 (New York), Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town), and Huis Marseille (Amsterdam), how do different contexts, in terms of geographic location and institutional set-up, determine the reception of your work?

I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, transitioning quickly from Doordarshan to MTV. Television shaped my sensibility; I remember antennas, signals, and the tuning of channels. Maybe that is why I enjoy “tuning” my work to the audience. For me, exhibition-making is on its own an artistic practice, just like the books I create. I do not focus on what I am putting out in a public space but on what I want the audience to feel or take away.

In 2010, when I first showed my work Life is Elsewhere, which dealt with mental health issues within my family, I remember people coming up to discuss how their family members and friends were encountering similar situations. I think people form a connection when they encounter a work that expresses something they themselves find difficult to articulate. Finding that thread can become the bridge between the work and the viewer, no matter where in the world I am showcasing it.

In an era of image saturation and digital manipulation, how do you navigate the tension between truth and distortion in your visual storytelling?

I make work to make sense of the world. I am interested in patterns,both intimate and systemic. For me, everyday acts and larger social structures are inseparable; they exist on a spectrum of lived experience. If you can see them as part of the same range, connections begin to emerge. In this age of information and manipulation, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Working with a degree of scepticism tinged with self-doubt actually helps.

It is like holding sand: neither too tight nor so loose that it slips through your fingers. Information, in the way it is flowing and also the way it might potentially be manipulated, feels quite volatile. I think a bit of distance could nurture adaptability as meanings and patterns shift around us.

Finally, what does this international recognition mean to you at this stage of your artistic journey?

Honestly, I find more joy in making the work itself than in any of these accolades.