Sohrab Hura’s multi-channel work The Lost Head & The Bird: ACT 1 to 12 captivates with its stunning flood of images. Hura’s photos shown in ever shorter intervals like in a slide show affect the eye almost like eruptions. The picture of a contorted human nude at the beginning of the video is accompanied by a short story about the headless girl Madhu written and read by the artist. At the end of the fairy tale, the mode of the picture units changes, accompanied by gripping guitar riffs by Hannes d’Hoine and Sjoerd Bruil. Without commentary, abstract and obscure, pulsating photographs of everyday life in the Indian coastal strip can now be seen along with excerpts of pop cultural videos at an increasing speed. The quick succession and changing pairs of image units lend the static photos an irresistible dynamism. The moment of force is intensified by an accelerating sequence of images and the accompanying music. The pictures culminate in a climax of violence, in photos of blood, poverty, and uprising, leaving us in a state of emotional turbulence, an almost tangible overstraining of what can be visually grasped. Hura’s powerful images question the sociopolitical developments of the past years in India and their impact on the mood in society: »Everything had started to feel unreal and absurd because of the extremities of polarization and violence and also the silent habituation of it—it had started to affect the way I photographed.« Hura’s work extracts the essence of sexual, religious, and political violence in India that can almost be physically felt. The viewers turn into voyeurs and cannot elude the radical reality anymore. The voyeuristic aspect functions as a link between fictive story and image. The fictive photographer seeking to document the marvelous and gruesome events in the Indian coastal strip can be read here as a metaphor of voyeurism in society as a whole.
For Hura, the border between voyeurism and active participation in violent acts is constantly blurred. Humans construct the consequences they draw about the world through momentary images and information. By presenting twelve video sequences that differ only in details and thus shift the context, Hura negates this system and opens up new paths of judgment.

Anna Holms

Artist Statement
A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored. The twelve subsequent variations of the film turn into a puzzle constantly changing itself, pulling in different directions psychologically, emotionally and intellectually, never remaining constant. I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don’t stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

Sohrab Hura