Sohrab Hura Awarded 2025 Eye Art & Film Prize
153May 22, 2025
Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum has announced Indian artistSohrab Huraas the eleventh winner of the Eye Art & Film Prize, an annual €30,000 ($33,000) award established in 2015 to support artists whose practices span film and the visual arts. Previous recipients of the honor include Francis Alÿs, Meriem Bennani, Wang Bing, Kahlil Joseph, and Hito Steyerl. Hura is known for works across film, drawing, photography, sound, and text that explore intimate social themes as well as the broader structures of power.
“What makes Hura so intriguing is that he does not confine himself to a single discipline,” said the prize jury in a statement. “He moves effortlessly between still and moving images, between cinematic rhythms and photo collages. His creations exist somewhere between essay and encounter, between documentary and dream. In doing so, he sharply and at times poetically reveals the contradictions and surreal nature of contemporary life—particularly in the context of South Asia—while at the same time building a visual language that resonates across the world.”
Born in 1981 in Chinsurah, West Bengal, Hura lives and works in New Delhi. When he was seventeen, his mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he began taking photographs while in college as a way of coping with her illness. While his earlier works, such as “River,” a series investigating a trio of cities along the River Ganges and its tributary, and “Land of a Thousand Struggles,” which centers India’s displaced rural community, were in the social documentary vein, later works, such as the photo journals Life Is Elsewhere and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!, which present his daily existence with his mother in dreamy black-and-white images, embody domestic themes. Power structures are a favorite topic too, as embodied by his experimental film The Lost Head & The Bird, which examines misinformation and violence in society, while his book The Coast investigates religious, sexual, and caste-related violence along India’s coast. Hura has published seven books to date; recent solo and group shows include those at MoMA PS1, New York; Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town; and Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, India.