I’m familiar with this as I find myself moving my neck and head closer, and further away, even though I’m experiencing the show through a screen. In photographs and recordings, the central room of the gallery awakens the senses, urging the viewer to swim through colours and arrive at their own lucid imagery. At first glance, I’m immediately struck by the word’s ‘celestial,’ ‘intimate,’ ‘groovy,’ and ‘luscious,’ and I find myself flitting in and out of Hura’s fictious as well as realistic scenes - almost in a prance.

“I think photography is such a physical process, and we don’t pay attention to that aspect of it. We often brush off the question ‘what camera do you use?’ when in fact I think it’s such an important enquiry because it determines the way you move, and that affects the ‘touch’ of the work for me,” explains Hura. It reminds me of Dayanita Singh’s body of work titled Dancing With My Camera, which also alludes to this idea of stretching, and movement that allows one to let go off the stiffness while making images.

It's interesting that a static medium like photography/painting can find itself in motion dependent on its treatment and composition. For instance, the protagonists in Hura’s drawings have stretchy limbs, and elongated forms that make the image itself look like a fragment of imagination or a dreamlike sequence, as opposed to a realistically sketched portrait. This is extremely deliberate, as Hura is attempting to break the increasingly sceptic viewer by giving them a slice of reality- but in a form that is palatable.

“I think our responses are very conditional. Viewers first want to know is this photograph made on film or is it digital? Is it a real photograph, or is it AI? And depending on the answer, we then react to whether it is special or not. But the moment we know that something isn’t genuine, we don’t look at it the same way. So, there is an echo to that image, and sometimes we make things conditional to either align to, or to disrupt that echo,” contemplates the artist.

Only a few days prior to this piece, I notice Hura’s post on Instagram that says he began experimentations with ink. Much like his enlarged painting strokes, the ink spreads across the paper in grand gestures. Unknowingly, this invites the viewer to pause and pay attention as they scroll through a bombardment of images on an algorithm that thrives on it. The artist and I talk about this numbness that has emerged because of social media and now even as we are constantly consuming violent images coming out from the genocide in Gaza and Sudan, it takes a lot for us to pause and acknowledge the large-scale atrocities that are constantly at play because of an unfortunate desensitisation that has occurred.

“I think we’re living in a moment where photography is a lot like a loose elastic of a pyjama that is starting to slip. By that I mean that it’s starting to lose a bit of its function. It doesn’t manage to hold much, and so for me it’s about getting a new elastic band that can do the work that it’s supposed to do. Which is why I’m constantly experimenting with different mediums. The burden of the violent image lies on both sides - with the maker as well as the witness who is trying their best to move away or avoid it. So really through fiction, or my drawings, I hope to be able to address these atrocities in a way that keeps people engaged,” explains Hura.

During an exhibition walkthrough, the artist mentions that drawing for him, was his way of getting back to ‘the broken image,’ or ‘the glitch.’ As a listener, the words might hold an air of distrust, but for Hura, it is this distrust that is central to discerning fake news from real information. “The broken image holds the intent right at the start,” he says, which is imperative in today’s world of constant misinformation. This concept of a ‘broken image’ might also hold a sense of poetry, that as Hura ruminates, allows people to linger longer.

In an essay written by the artist in 2021 titled Images Are Masks, he elaborates on this thought by saying “Glitches tug at us, draw us closer, whisper to us, manipulate us into believing that they want to share with us their secrets. In today’s more fixed, homogenized, and polarized world, where information is meant to be definite and therefore limited, glitches open-up fault lines of doubt. These cracks of doubt are the spaces from which we can pull out new layers of understanding…” It reminds me of a new trend of ‘cute,’ AI animal videos where they are seen in unbelievable situations but have still managed to take the internet by storm. One can only spot the extra limb or the glitch so-to-speak if they look closely, or with a keen eye.

In stark contrast to Hura’s fantastical musings that are laden with paintings by classical artists, meme culture, and his own quirky observations, his parallel show A Winter Summer (6 November, 2025 - 6 December 2025), at the Alipore Museum, Kolkata showcases two extreme seasons through the lens of documentary photography. Reflecting on the transition of snow in Kashmir, and the scorching summer in Barwani, Madhya Pradesh, the artist brings together an edit that holds undercurrents of political, economic, and social upheaval in different geographies.

As I move through the walls of the historic museum, it makes me wonder how different this work would have been had it been in the form of drawings. Would it read with as much of a haunting as it does now? Would the warmth of the snow and the cold of the desert intermingle as easily? How would we read the shifting shapes of stretched limbs that are equally proportionate? Through my meanderings I arrive at the conclusion that it is the combination of the artist’s contemplations and our projections that make the work. And maybe if we were to look closer at the glitch, we’d find a message silently waiting, speaking only to those who are willing to listen.