Tapestry of seasons, stories, and subtle acts of defiance

The personal is the political ~ a refrain repeated into cliché, until an artist’s canvas reasserts that even the most fragile of memories can serve as vessels of social realisation. When an artist situates his practice within this charged intimacy of lived experiences, the image becomes a space where private ache and public rupture coexist without apology. In these resonant interstices, the domestic morphs into a quiet manifesto, insisting that the stories we inherit and the stories we bury are equally complicit in shaping the world we call our own. Frida Kahlo once wrote, “I don’t really know if my paintings are surreal or not, but I do know that they represent the frankest expression of myself.” In many ways, Sohrab Hura’s politics of seeing emerges from a similar refusal to categorise his craft into an arrangement of orderly visual truths. His gaze is neither neutral nor detached, but steeped in the tensions of selfhood and the dissonances that mediate how a life is witnessed and remembered.

A Winter Summer

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Hura’s solo exhibition, A Winter Summer, on view from 6 November 2025 to 6 December 2025 at the historic Alipore Museum, marks the India debut of two seminal bodies of work ~ Snow and The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer. A Magnum Photos member and acclaimed photographer, he approaches the ordinary with a gaze attuned to extremes. In Snow, Hura documents Kashmir across three phases of winter ~ Chillai Kalan, Chillai Khurd, and Chillai Bachha ~ using the melting snow as a metaphor for the region’s fraught realities and the contradictions within a landscape often presented as paradisiacal. Speaking to The Statesman, he explained, “In the period of almost six years from 2019 to now, we went through COVID, witnessed mass migration of daily-wage workers because of the lockdown and all the hardships it brought, observed a livestreamed genocide of the Palestinian people, and now face an imminent existential crisis driven by artificial intelligence. In general, the world has felt like a cruel place. All of it has made me want to consciously foreground scenes of care that the Kashmiri people have towards each other and towards life in general.” The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer chronicles fifteen years of summers in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh, capturing the relentless heat, the arid terrain, and the steadfast rhythms of everyday life. The project began in 2013 when Hura first visited the village of Pati, and over the next 15 years, he returned repeatedly, sustained by the relationships he forged there. His photographs trace not only the physical landscape ~ dusty fields, riverbanks, seasonal changes ~ but also the quiet persistence and dignity of human life, offering a careful meditation on endurance, community, and the fine cadences of a rural ecosystem. Across both works, the changing seasons do more than set the scene. They chart life’s peaks and troughs, probe social and political tensions, and elevate routine gestures into testaments of survival and resilience.

The forest

From 4 November 2025 to 3 January 2026, Experimenter’s Ballygunge gallery hosts The Forest, Hura’s profoundly autobiographical work in which his personal world unfolds with wry humour and acute sensitivity. This unique body of work is a kaleidoscopic array of moods and sensations, interwoven with pastel shades that whisper as much as they speak. Drawn from his ongoing series of oil paintings, the title resonates on multiple levels ~ the forest as a tangible landscape, a space of refuge or solace, and a psychological terrain where memory, imagination, and the unforeseen may converge. Looking at Bougainvillea Tree and The Summer Sun, one sees relaxed human figures lying beneath the protective canopy of its cherry-stained foliage, bathed in temperamental warmth. The tree’s branches serve as both literal and metaphorical shelter, providing shade, comfort, and a subtle hiatus away from the conundrums of the outside world. In a similar vein, Summer Mornings paints a moody sky in pale hues of pink and blue, with thin, fragile branches framing an abstract royal blue bird at its centre. Both works evoke a sense of worldly innocence, inviting viewers to pause, observe, and linger in these fleeting aesthetics of daily life. Scattered among these moments of everyday observation, The Forest takes occasional pit stops, shifting gently from scenes of everyday ease to moments steeped in personal vulnerability. In Father in Hospital, Hura renders the frailty of an old man, depicting his wrinkled, weathered hands ~ one wrist encircled with a hospital band, the other attached to a saline drip. The oil on canvas captures the weight of illness, care, and the passage of time, welcoming viewers into a space of introspection. Continuing this inward trajectory, 3 p.m. on a Sunday in May, presumably a self-portrait, presents a seated figure with slumped shoulders and clasped hands, a posture heavy with weariness and resignation. Each work successfully maps the delicate interiority of human life, granting form to emotions that resist articulation. Hura’s narratives deepen further when the personal meets the geopolitical, most strikingly in his heartfelt study of a Palestinian couple living in Syria as political refugees. In Basam Shakaa and Enaya al-Fassed, two figures rest in a field of tall, flickering grass ~ a man lies back, his head cradled tenderly in his beloved’s lap ~ forming a pocket of calm against a world that has denied them certainty. Furnished with soft pastels on paper, the scene’s gentle brightness ~ the basket set aside, the trees rising protectively around them ~ intensifies rather than softens the tension implied by the caption provided. Quiet companionship translates to a language of escape, granting the lovers a momentary reprieve from the violence that shadows their existence. Yet Hura’s politics are not confined to sorrow; they often sharpen through humour ~ that unruly instrument which punctures the pomp of power. The Forest houses a wickedly funny frame where Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin raise champagne flutes, their expressions hovering somewhere between suspicion and stiff performance. Scrawled above them, the line reads ~ “that online friend that you finally meet.” The sarcasm lands with disarming clarity, exposing the farce of forced alliances and the carefully staged camaraderie that props up the theatre of statecraft. Counterbalancing this political mischief is a gentler humour, the sort that hides in the eccentricities of the ordinary. Sometimes, it surfaces in tragically relevant style relics ~ as in the artist’s sketch of a bulldog standing bolt upright, titled Men Over 35 in Skinny Jeans, annotated with a defeated confession, “everyone got to stop sending me this meme.”

The incredible tonal and thematic elasticity of The Forest is mirrored in its materials, spanning oil on canvas and pastel drawings, extending into the raw, cut-edge clarity of cardboard in Timelines. In this sculptural cluster of painted boxes, Hura trades the smoothness of canvas for the corrugated grain of everyday packaging, letting its makeshift architecture become part of the narrative. Each box is painted on every surface, then folded, unfolded, turned inside-out, allowing images to collide, interrupt, or realign. Timelines draws its strength from this mutability, sitting as the central installation in the exhibition, the one that most seamlessly sutures the personal with the political. As the exhibition draws toward its enigmatic culmination, Hura’s new film Disappeared makes its India debut. Across its 5 minutes and 40 seconds, what begins as a deceptively simple, slightly skewed view of a forest tent gradually unravels into something stranger and more searching. In its quiet play with distortion and perception, Disappeared becomes a soft riddle unfolding at the edge of comprehension.

What these twin ventures ultimately reveal is Hura’s instinctive negotiation between control and surrender. He is an artist who trusts the unpredictability of his subjects and mediums, allowing moments of humour, fragility, and absurdity to emerge organically, while actively asserting his moral and aesthetic compass. “It feels easy to work intuitively and with the same joy of doing your favourite everyday thing. This way of working allows for the work to emerge out of the process rather than me actively working towards any specific topic or subject,” he confirms. At its core, his practice exemplifies how attention to the textures of one’s environment and the nuances of human experience can manifest in art that reflects, questions, and responds to its conditions.