Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed

Things Felt But Not Quite Expressed collects Sohrab Hura’s kinetic illustrations made between 2022 and 2024 of everyday scenes of love, joy, family, and relationships. Renowned for his self-published photographic books, here Hura departs from the fixedness of the photographic form, using technicolour soft pastel to imbue his portraits, still lifes, and quotidian scenes with fluidity and to charge them with feeling. We see tender portraits of ailing family members, vivid sunsets and free-flowing bodies of water, mischievous pets and siblings, spectral figures meeting in unrefined landscapes, and surreal cremation rites. Portraits of isolation and illness are interleaved with recreated memes and convivial tableaux. The sardonic titles of the works collude with the viewer to poke fun at the drawings’ subjects but also at the artist himself, creating an intimate viewing experience. 

These works originated in a period in which the artist felt unable to connect with the permanency of photographs. Pivoting to drawing enabled him to capture the whimsy and ephemerality of everyday life within an increasingly polarised world. This playful tone is extended by the book’s mix of impressionist and surrealist style, making for an unpredictable volume which experiments with how to evoke and immortalise feeling through art.