Waves foam over revellers in the sea. A man cracks open a coconut with his head, pours its liquid contents onto his face. A woman rocks, trance-like, before a flame. Children ride on rides at an amusement park while stoned parents look on. These are moments drawn from The Coast (2020), a short film by Sohrab Hura filmed among pilgrims, worshippers of Kali, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The Coast is a portrait of delirium, rupture, and the liminal space between one day and the next.
Hura began his career as a documentary photographer, but retreated from the medium when he realised that a world awash in images was a world endlessly contested, instrumentalised, manipulated. He turned to painting in the earliest days of the pandemic, depicting scenes drawn from quotidian life but also from the internet and the world of politics. Sense and nonsense collide.
His soft pastel paintings on paper have the texture and energy of casual snapshots. Some live on the surfaces of cardboard boxes, in a series called Timelines. Peer into one of these boxes and there’s often an additional image tucked inside. Idiosyncratic annotations on the wall communicate the feeling of a diary, inhabiting a body of work that feels tender and personal.
—Negar Azimi
