Kolkata Hosts Sohrab Hura’s The Forest: Memory, Media and Intimacy on View

Sohrab Hura’s The Forest is his third solo at Experimenter Ballygunge Place, Kolkata. It is a corpus of fresh oil paintings, etchings on paper, and a video to chart the frame of mind and create an imagery. The title of the exhibition, The Forest, gestures to a range of terrains situated in the compact frames of the painter. It depicts a site of refuge and concealment, but also signifies a space where waiting becomes an act of possibility. The artworks are drawn from a continuing series of oil paintings and smaller artworks on paper that depict vibrance and diversity. 

The Works and Media: the Pellet & Epiphany

Visually, The Forest accentuates tangibility. Hura neutralizes the sped-up image economy of our social media feeds and television memories with pastels, gouache, and oils that demand a more gradual and slower attention to detail. Surfaces of the paintings retain traces of the hand rather than the monotony of an algorithm. Small-scale works on paper sit alongside more significant canvases and a moving-image piece, creating a rhythm that essentially seeks total physical navigation in the gallery space. This creates an enveloping factor that churns the creative quotient in the minds of the spectators, making them halt, think, and analyze.

Themes & Motifs

Across press material and social posts, Experimenter highlights the sources informing Hura’s imagery; it includes the most contemporary phenomena, i.e., sharing memes, the compactness of social media algorithms, along with personal history and political events. These elements are amalgamated into the canvas, not simply as didactic commentaries, but as sediments of contemporary consciousness. The media we ingest, the family traces we carry, and the political moments that puncture ordinary days, everything finds space in Hura’s paintings. These works manifest a voice in all these themes and locate them through recurring forms that might be trees, bodies, or rooms, allowing a slippage between interior and exterior, image and recollection. It not only signifies the black and white part of society, but equally reflects on the greys. 

Installation & Viewing Experience

Tracing the previous exhibitions of Hura in the same venue, one can deduce that the comfort of the artist probably lies within a dense photo-grid setup, which is more measured and offers adequate hanging schemes. This time, for The Forest, the interplay of small works on paper with the larger oil canvases, accompanied by the video, implies an exhibition exclusively designed for repeated viewing rather than a one-pass glance. 

Sohrab Hura’s Evolving Practice

As the painter moves between photography, painting, video, and publishing (through Ugly Dog Books), he has gained the label of a “shapeshifter”. His recent institutional attention includes a recent US survey and critical recognition in 2024–25, framing The Forest as a very productive moment in his career, where storytelling, memory, and intimacy are tied together and presented through papers and canvases. This exhibition, then, is both a continuation and a recalibration of an artist known for photographic narratives, now insisting that paint can slow the images we mistake for understanding.

Key highlights 

• The exhibition brings together fresh oil paintings alongside recent works on paper and a video, offering a multi-sensory field of images.
• Hura foregrounds “waiting” and slowness: paint and paper are used to resist the habitual scanning encouraged by digital feeds. 
• Recurring motifs — ambiguous trees, domestic scenes, partial figures — open onto several narrative possibilities rather than resolving into a single story. 
• The show is positioned as Hura’s third solo at Experimenter in Kolkata and continues his engagement with intimate archival impulses.

Takeaway: Why The Forest matters now

The present world is saturated with instant images and prompt-based AI-generated works.
It kind of pushes us as humans to a point where we don’t wish to put effort in certain cases, creating a negative comfort zone around us that also functions as a rampart around our creative conscience. It is in this context that Sohrab Hura’s The Forest matters because it stages a small, insistently human countermeasure to automation. The paintings’ tryst with the viewers’ specs makes time slow down; it gives the spectators a space to not only analyze the painting, but also spend quality time with themselves. For the audience in Kolkata, this exhibition offers a rare loop-back from the screen to the hand, inviting them to treat images as a place to confide, not to scroll through. The world is so interconnected that losing a point of contact would mean literally missing out on everything under the sun. Social media has turned the world into a more reachable place; however, it is equally a necessary evil. Through these paintings, the artist wants us to be judicious in what we choose to consume and let others consume; he wants us to be more accountable towards ourselves by allowing our own selves the time to renew attention and have meaningful memories laid throughout the trail called life.