New Delhi-based artist Sohrab Hura’s first American survey, “Mother,” showcases the many different mediums he employs, from the lens practice for which he is best known to his more recent in drawing and painting. Situated somewhere between testimony and confession, its perspective blurs the autobiographical and the sociopolitical in unexpected and often revealing ways.

The black and white photographs constituting the first works exhibited, Land of a thousand struggles (2005-06), document the daily hardships experienced by rural communities in central India, as well as their ongoing struggle for dignity and justice. Hura pairs the images with hand-scribbled captions that situate them in a newspaper frame, compensating for the possibility of objectifying his subjects through the camera lens. Filmed during numerous visits to Kashmir, Snow (2015-ongoing) deftly addresses the ongoing military occupation in this restive northern state, highlighting examples of everyday abjection as the winter landscape gradually thaws: a bloodstain from a recently slaughtered chicken; a hand holding out a tuft of freshly shorn hair as an offering. While this macabre subtext underscores the banality and omnipresence of violence under occupation, other photographs seem more specific, even prescient. A snowball cradled furtively behind a back seems to symbolize both a powerful commitment to resistance and its ultimate futility in the face of the immense might of the occupying army, while a stack of eyes of Animals commemorates the many innocent people blinded by pellets used to suppress nonviolent protests in recent years.

The abject is even more pronounced in The side (2013-19; 2020), a series of photographs and a video that Hura took during a religious festival in Tamil Nadu. Laced with lurid colors and a blinding flash that renders locations unearthly and bodies incandescent, the photos present a masquerade of familiar surrealist tropes of body horror, ocular anxiety, and gender slippage. Sight is central to Hindu religious practice, but the many eyes that appear in these images, sometimes enlarged or darkened, portend something more sinister: a growing culture of surveillance that, paradoxically, obscures what can be seen and known . Metaphorizing the coastline as the “skin” of the nation, the video presents the nighttime ceremonial submersion that marks the closing of the festival as a collective libidinal release, both cathartic and disjointed. The associated single-channel video The lost head and the bird (2019) expands on this further. As the titular parable told ends, a slideshow of photographs of The side gradually accelerates into a dizzying frenzy of found footage: media coverage of bizarre and horrific stories, iconic Bollywood stills, recovered WhatsApp clips documenting incidents of misogyny and hatred. This visual barrage comes close to the hysterical unconscious of a nation that has lost its mind and is increasingly detached from reality, truth and civility.

In recent years, Hura has experimented with translating his particular way of seeing into slower mediums such as pastel drawing and gouache and acrylic painting, a shift that softens the abjection with humor and an almost palpable tenderness. A salon-style hanging of brightly colored drawings includes portraits of family and friends and scenes from everyday life: small intimacies, secret joys, inevitable deaths. While some show fidelity to a photographic source, retaining the perspective and cropping of a selfie or the intimacy and immediacy of a snapshot, others feel entirely imagined, cumulatively blurring distinct modes of creation and of image consumption. Images of Hura’s mother – the subject of her first three self-published photo books – reappear in this exhibition, juxtaposed with Bittersweet (2019), a disconcerting video slideshow that provides intimate access to his struggles with acute paranoid schizophrenia. The various strands of Hura’s practice that run through “Mother” suggest that her condition might also serve as an apt metaphor for the current state of her homeland.

Sohrab Hura, “Mother”, is on view at MoMA PS1, New York, until February 17

^{Main image: Sohrab Hura, Land of a thousand struggles, 2005-2006, in Sohrab Hura, “Mother”, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: MoMA PS1, New York; photography: Steven Paneccasio}