Sohrab Hura's 'Mother' at MoMA PS1 Examines Care and Estrangement

Sohrab Hura's survey exhibition 'Mother' at MoMA PS1 in New York, on view through February 17, 2025, uses the metaphor of the mother to explore social, political, and economic safeguards. The show spans two decades of the artist's career, moving from photojournalistic works to more self-reflexive forms. In the main room, inkjet prints from Hura's 'Snow' series (2015–) depict bare legs in snow in Kashmir, a contested territory where India imposed a communications blackout in 2019. The black-and-white video 'Pati' (2010/2020) shows rural children laboring, while the photographic series 'Land of a Thousand Struggles' (2005–06) documents subsistence farmers, migrant workers, and victims of police violence, created during Hura's travels with activists from the Right to Food movement. In smaller galleries, the video 'The Lost Head and the Bird' (2019) presents a rapid montage of provocative images, critiquing how images become 'motherless' in the age of social media, detached from their creators. The video 'Bittersweet' (2019) features Hura's mother, who lives with acute paranoid schizophrenia, shown in various states around her house. A four-page letter on the wall reveals she raised a dog named Elsa for 13 years. In a gouache painting titled 'Mother' (2023), her skin is grey and lips black, resembling a mask. The exhibition implies that when the mother as metaphor remains inaccessible, her 'children' must bear witness to one another.