Into the rabbit hole of Sohrab Hura’s art

When I started making Spill, I realised I don’t have a unidimensional relationship with photography,” says Sohrab Hura, referring to his latest body of work, which is currently showing at Experimenter-Ballygunge Place, Kolkata, and on the online viewing room of the gallery. Since his father gave him a camera in the early 2000s, Hura has held on to photography like a “drug”, as he told Mint in 2014; it has been his “safe space”. From Hura’s early work in 2005, where he chronicled the government’s rural employment scheme in Rajasthan, to The Coast, hypnotic video footage of people wading into the ocean in a frenzy, a thread runs through Spill, though it does not sew together a linear narrative. To look at Hura’s work, therefore, is to be constantly assailed by such multiplicity of meanings generated by the visual cornucopia we are drowning in every day, in real life or on the internet.