Mother as Mirror: Sohrab Hura’s Poignant Exploration at MoMA PS1

Installation view of Sohrab Hura: Mother, on view at MoMA PS1 from October 10, 2024 through February 17, 2025. Photo: Steven Paneccasio

By YOHANNA M ROA November 27, 2024

Sohrab Hura’s exhibition ¨Mother¨ at MoMA PS1 is a deeply moving testament to the complexities of familial love, mental illness, and resilience. The series of photographs and videos offer an intimate portrait of Hura’s mother, who has lived with schizophrenia, while subtly exploring the impact of this relationship on his life and artistic practice. In ¨Mother¨ the viewer is invited to witness the fragmented and often painful realities of care, isolation, and the delicate threads that connect memory and trauma.

Hura’s visual narrative is rooted in the mundane, capturing domestic moments that resonate with an almost haunting familiarity. His black-and-white photographs create a sense of quiet intensity, drawing attention to the ordinary: a half-empty chair, peeling paint, or a disheveled bed. These details demand the viewer’s attention, resisting the pull of spectacle and instead asking us to look closer, to lean into the subtleties. The photographs unfold like a diary—a deeply personal record of the artist’s life with his mother. The fragmented presentation feels as if we are paging through a family album, absorbing the melancholy and love that each frame holds.

The monochromatic palette used in much of Hura’s work echoes the fragility of his subject matter, while moments of color occasionally interrupt the visual rhythm, signaling heightened emotion or memory. His use of diptychs, triptychs, and photographic sequences evokes the fragmented nature of memory itself—overlapping, nonlinear, and elusive. This choice mirrors the structure of memory, as if he is inviting us to embrace what remains unclear and unsaid. The gaps and shadows within the images tell a story as much as the visual details themselves.

In a conversation with Hura, he emphasized that his work was never about neat categorizations. He did not set out to make a political or feminist statement, yet his narrative undeniably grapples with the political dimensions of mental illness, social expectations, and the role of women. His mother becomes both a symbol and a human presence—vulnerable, resilient, and haunting. His exploration of their relationship reveals the delicate and often fraught dynamics of caregiving, love, and dependence. Each image seems to exist in a state of tension—between presence and absence, intimacy and distance, comfort and discomfort.

Sohrab Hura. The green dress. 2022. Soft pastel on paper. Courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata and Mumbai

The layout of the exhibition is intimate and intentionally disorienting, encouraging viewers to move through the space as they would through a labyrinth of memories. Photographs are pinned loosely to walls, unframed, creating an atmosphere akin to a private space rather than a public gallery. This curatorial decision invites the viewer to step closer, to engage with the images in a tactile way, as if sifting through someone else’s personal mementos. Hura’s arrangement of images reflects his desire to challenge traditional narratives, inviting ambiguity and resisting a linear understanding of his mother’s experience.

One of the most poignant images in the exhibition features Hura’s mother, half-lit, her gaze piercing yet tender. The light and shadow dance across her face, blurring the boundary between the personal and the political, challenging how we see and understand mental illness within a familial and social context. The photograph speaks not only to the artist’s experience but to a larger discourse on caregiving, on how mental health is navigated within the domestic space, often behind closed doors.

Sohrab Hura. Bittersweet. 2019. Video (color, sound), 13:48 min. Collection Moraes-Barbosa

Hura’s approach to storytelling is inherently fragmented. His images exist like isolated vignettes—moments of stillness captured amidst the chaos of daily life. There is a rawness to his photography, an authenticity that refuses to hide the imperfections of life with a loved one who struggles with mental illness. Hura’s gaze is both loving and detached, conveying the difficulty of his position as both son and documentarian. This duality is central to the emotional power of ¨Mother¨ as it forces us to confront our own discomfort when looking at the complexity of love, dependency, and care.

In our discussion, Hura spoke of his decision to slow down his photographic process. There is a painterly quality to his work—a tactile sensibility that comes from a deliberate engagement with each frame, each shadow, and each ray of light. His images recall sketches, each frame an attempt to capture the shifting essence of time. This slowness stands in stark contrast to the speed of contemporary visual culture, where images are often consumed rapidly and without pause. Hura’s choice to resist this velocity mirrors a desire to see beyond the surface.

Sohrab Hura. The Coast. 2013-2019. Archival pigment prints. Installation view of Sohrab Hura: Mother, on view at MoMA PS1 from October 10, 2024 through February 17, 2025. Photo: Mason Blake

The exhibition’s nonlinear format mirrors the nonlinear nature of memory and mental illness. Hura’s use of visual storytelling emphasizes the fragmented, the partial, and the incomplete as valid forms of understanding. The blurred, imperfect images resist traditional expectations of clarity, insisting instead on ambiguity as a space for reflection. This resistance to narrative closure feels like a gesture of vulnerability and defiance—a recognition that some experiences cannot be neatly explained or resolved.

The installation at MoMA PS1 uses space to disrupt the boundaries of the traditional gallery setting, encouraging viewers to meander, to take their time, and to embrace moments of confusion and discovery. Photographs are arranged with an apparent randomness that mirrors the disjointed nature of memory, compelling the audience to piece together fragments without a clear guide. This mirrors Hura’s own experience of navigating his mother’s illness, of living within a domestic space shaped by love and trauma, beauty and struggle.

Mother is an exhibition that does not offer easy answers. It is uncomfortable at times, challenging the viewer to sit with the messy, complicated reality of caregiving and familial love. Yet, amidst the discomfort, there is a profound beauty—a beauty that lies in the cracks of plaster, in the softness of light, in the unspoken bonds that tie us together. It is a beauty that demands to be seen and acknowledged, a reminder that to bear witness is itself an act of love. Hura’s photographs ask us not just to look but to see—to see the quiet resilience of his mother, the endurance of their bond, and the unending complexity of the human heart. WM