Indian artist Sohrab Hura has been awarded the Eye Art & Film Prize 2025, an annual award celebrating the achievements of an artist whose work bridges visual art and film. The prize comes with a €30,000 ($33,800) grant to support a solo exhibition at Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum, which administers the award.
“Hura’s work is distinguished by its emotional intensity, formal innovation, and a bold approach to navigating the space between art and film,” the prize’s jurors said in a joint statement.
Born in Chinsurah, India in 1981, Hura did not originally pursue photography, instead completing a master’s degree at the Delhi School of Economics. He started taking photographs in college after his father gave him a Nikon FM10 camera.
Today, Hura is recognized for his surreal photography and film examining social and political belonging. Among his best-known works is the photobook trilogy Sweet Life, comprising the books Life is Elsewhere (2015), A Proposition for Departure (2017), and Look It’s Getting Sunny Outside!!! (2018). This trilogy deals with the artist’s relationship to his mother, who was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 17 years old.
Switching between film and still photography, Hura often focuses on landscapes, climates, and cultural multiplicities of India, where he captures scenes from everyday life. His photographic series such as “Snow” or “The Song of Sparrows in a Hundred Days of Summer” engage with the country’s seasonal extremes. Meanwhile, one of his first projects, “Land of a Thousand Struggles” (2005–06), documented a grassroots political movement in rural India that organized in support of the passage of social security provisions.
Hura’s first U.S. survey, “Mother,” opened last year at MoMA PS1. Recent solo exhibitions have been staged by Experimenter in Mumbai and Peckham 24 in London, among others. Hura is a member of the photo cooperative Magnum Photos.
Established in 2015, the Eye Art & Film Prize has been awarded to artists including Chia-Wei Hsu in 2024, Garrett Bradley in 2023, and Saodat Ismailova in 2022. The inaugural prize winner was German filmmaker Hito Steyerl.
