The Indian artist Sohrab Hura is the eleventh winner of the Eye Art & Film Prize, awarded every year by Eye Filmmuseum. Hura receives the award for the powerful way in which he captures today’s surreal reality in images. The jury praises the way he moves smoothly between photography, film and painting to explore a wide range of themes – from violence, inequality and religion to mental health, his own family life and the distortion of reality through the digital flow of images.
Sohrab Hura was selected by an international jury and is awarded a sum of 30,000 EUR and a presentation at Eye Filmmuseum. Supported by Ammodo, the prize enables the winner to develop new work.
In Hura’s creations, the personal often goes hand in hand with a critical view of society. His projects range from an intimate and vulnerable account of life with his ill mother to raw and absurd portrayals of violence and disinformation. He also sheds light on tensions and fault lines in Indian society, as in his poetic photo reportage of life in the divided region of Kashmir.
Hura’s work is remarkably versatile – both in subject and medium. He describes his oeuvre as a tree whose branches reach toward the light, while the roots intertwine with those of other trees in a larger underground network. His films, books, photographic works, drawings and paintings thus form an interconnected whole.
In the words of the jury: “What makes Hura so intriguing is that he does not confine himself to a single discipline. 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.”
Sohrab Hura is a leading artist who demonstrates how hybrid media facilitate new forms of storytelling. His work explores uncharted territories and redefines what it means to share stories in a time of fragmentation and uncertainty. It is for precisely this reason that the jury expresses its deep appreciation for him.
Biography of Sohrab Hura
Sohrab Hura (1981) lives and works in New Delhi, India. He started taking photographs at the age of twenty-one to cope with his mother’s illness. His early work was documentary in nature and highlighted themes such as livelihood security in rural India. In 2005, for instance, he photographed the Right to Food movement. Today, his work is a varied interplay of film, drawings, photography, sound and text. Many of his works seek to grasp a world in constant flux and Hura’s own place within it. While family and illness are central in the photobooks Life Is Elsewhere and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!!, the experimental film The Lost Head & The Bird focuses on power structures in society.
Hura has recently had solo and group exhibitions in, among others, MoMA PS1 in New York (2025), Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2022) and Huis Marseille in Amsterdam (2021). His film The Coast (2020) premiered at the Berlinale in 2021. At the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2020 he won the main prize from the Internationale Jury for his film Bittersweet (2019), and in 2018 he won the NRW Award for his film The Lost Head & The Bird (2017). The latter film also won the Videonale Award of the Fluentum Collection in 2019. Hura has published seven books, including The Coast (2019), winner of the Aperture – Paris Photo Photobook of the Year Award in 2019. Hura’s work is held in the permanent collections of the MoMA in New York, the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in India, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Hura is a member of Magnum Photos.
Eye Art & Film Prize
The Eye Prize has been awarded annually since 2015 to an artist or filmmaker who is building an exceptional body of work and contributes in an extraordinary way to new developments at the intersection of visual art and film. The prize consists of a sum of 30,000 EUR intended for the creation of new work. Since 2023, the Eye Prize has been supported by Ammodo.
Previous winners of the Eye Art & Film Prize have been Hito Steyerl(2015), Ben Rivers (2016), Wang Bing (2017), Francis Alÿs (2018), Meriem Bennani (2019), Kahlil Joseph (2020), Karrabing Film Collective (2021), Saodat Ismailova (2022), Garrett Bradley (2023) and Chia-Wei Hsu (2024).
The winner of the Eye Art & Film Prize 2023, the American artist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Garrett Bradley, is the subject of a major exhibition at Eye Filmmuseum this summer (June 14–September 7).
Jury and advisory board
Sohrab Hura was chosen as winner by an international jury, chaired by Eye director Bregtje van der Haak. This year’s jury consisted ofLeonardo Bigazzi (curator Fondazione In Between Art Film), Nanouk Leopold (filmmaker, theatre director, artist), Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (filmmaker/artist), Hila Peleg (curator/filmmaker) and Chris Dercon (managing director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain).
The list of nominated candidates was presented to the jury by an international advisory board, made up of Manthia Diawara (writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist and director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs, New York University), Hoor Al Qasimi (president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation), Júlia Rebouças (artistic director of the Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais), Rajendra Roy (chief curator of film at MoMA, New York), Eva Sangiorgi (artistic director of the Viennale, Vienna International Film Festival) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (director).
