Hoda Afshar (born 1983) is an Iranian documentary photographer who is based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre run by the Australian government. Her work has been featured in many exhibitions and is held in many permanent collections across Australia.
Initially hoping to study theatre and become an actor, but she was only granted her second choice, photography, at university.[2] She earned a bachelor's degree in fine art (photography) with first class honours[3] at the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran, and began her career as a photographer in 2005.[1] During her studies and subsequently, she photographed many of her friends' theatre performances, coming to realise that photography was essentially theatrical too.[2]
In 2019 Afshar completed her PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity".[1][3]
Practice and themes
Afshar says that her work explores how photographs may be "used or misused by power systems create certain hierarchies between people"; and that "[documentary photography] is a visual language that has been formed and established through the lens of colonisation".[1]
Her early understanding of photography as a theatrical art informs her practice, and she collaborates with her subjects, whom she sees as "actors", in a way that gives them agency.[2]
Her first project, in 2005, was a series of black and white photographs documenting Tehran's underground parties called Scene, but she could not show them in public.[1]
Afshar's two-channel video work, Remain (2018), includes spoken poetry by Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and Iranian poet Bijan Elahi. Afshar describes her method as "staged documentary", in which the men on the island are able to "re-enact their narratives with their own bodies and [gives] them autonomy to narrate their own stories". The video was shown as part of the Primavera 2018 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, from 9 November 2018 to 3 February 2019.[5][6][7] One of the photographs of Boochani taken for this project won the Bowness Photography Prize.[8][9] This portrait, along with several others taken as part of the Remain project, are held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.[10]
In March 2021, an exhibition of Afshar's portraits of nine whistleblowers was mounted at St Paul's Cathedral in Melbourne, in an exhibition named Agonistes (after the Greek word agonistes, meaning a person engaged in a struggle).[1][12][13]
In September 2023, the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted an exhibition of Afshar's work over the past decade, calling it "the first major solo exhibition by one of Australia's most innovative and unflinching photomedia artists". The exhibition, A Curve is a Broken Line, runs until 21 January 2024.[14][15] It contains several of her earlier works, along with a series of 12 large photographs commissioned by AGNSW, In Turn. The photos feature four Iranian Australian women plaiting one another's hair, and first holding a white dove before releasing it. This is based on a kind of ritualistic practice among Kurdish female fighters before setting out to fight Islamic State. The photographs are a response to the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in Iran in September 2022.[2] A book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition.[16]
Speak the Wind (Mack, 2021; photographs by Hoda Afhsar; essay by Michael Taussig[27]) This work documents the landscapes and people of the islands of Hormuz, Qeshm, and Hengam, in the Persian Gulf off the south coast of Iran.[28][29] Afshar got to know some of the people there, travelling there frequently over the years, and they told her about the history of the place. She said that "their narrations led the project", and she explores "the idea of being possessed by history, and in this context, the history of slavery and cruelty”.[30]
Speak the Wind (29 April – 22 May 2022), Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne. One of a series of official exhibitions of PHOTO 2022: International Festival of Photography, taking place in Melbourne and regional Victoria[32]
^"Remain". artgallery.wa.gov.au. Art Gallery of Western Australia. Retrieved 25 March 2021.
Further reading
Afshar, Hoda (5 July 2020). "Hoda Afshar". Artist Profile (Interview). Interviewed by Shkembi, Nur. This interview was originally published in Artist Profile, Issue 45, 2018
Afshar, Hoda (24 February 2021). "Hoda Afshar and Clarice Beckett"(Audio). ABC Radio National (Interview). The Art Show. Interviewed by Benson, Namila. Expires: Sat 27 Apr 2024. Afshar talks about Agonistes.
