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Hoda Afshar
Hoda Afshar.jpg
Born 1983 (age 41–42)
Tehran
Nationality Iranian
Known for documentary photography
Notable work
 Remain (2018)
Awards National Photographic Portrait Prize (2015), Bowness Photography Prize (2018)

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.

Since 2019 and as of 2023 Afshar teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne.

Early life and early education

Hoda Afshar by Hoda Afshar

Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1983, four years after the Iranian Revolution.

Initially hoping to study theatre and become an actor, but she was only granted her second choice, photography, at university. She earned a bachelor's degree in fine art (photography) with first class honours at the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran. During her studies and subsequently, she photographed many of her friends' theatre performances, coming to realise that photography was essentially theatrical too.

Life and work

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. From 2005 to 2006, Afshar worked as a photojournalist for Hamvatan newspaper in Tehran.

She moved to Australia in 2007, and in the same year completed a course at University of Technology Sydney, "Photojournalism Essential". In 2009 she completed a fine art diploma in photography and sculpture at the Meadowbank TAFE in Sydney.

From 2013 to 2021 Afshar lectured at the Photography Studies College in Melbourne.

Her first solo exhibition, Behold (2017, at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne), comprised a set of grainy photographs of men in a gay bathhouse taken in Iran in 2016.

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. One of the photographs of Boochani taken for this project won the Bowness Photography Prize. This portrait, along with several others taken as part of the Remain project, are held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In 2019 Afshar completed her PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity". In 2019 and Afshar started teaching at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne.

Behrouz Boochani by Hoda Afshar
Behrouz Boochani by Afshar

Afshar was the subject of a Compass program on ABC Television in 2019.

Afshar's book Speak the Wind (2021) documents the landscapes and people of the islands of Hormuz, Qeshm, and Hengam, in the Persian Gulf off the south coast of Iran. She 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".

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).

From September 2023 to January 2024, the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted an exhibition of Afshar's work over the past decade, A Curve is a Broken Line. It contained several of her earlier works, along with a series of 12 large photographs commissioned by AGNSW, In Turn. The photos featured 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. A book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition.

She is a board member of the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

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". 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.

Awards and recognition

  • Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize (2015), finalist for Dog's Breakfast
  • National Photographic Portrait Prize (2015), winner for Portrait of Ali
  • Bowness Photography Prize (2017), finalist for Untitled #1
  • Sotheby's Australia People's Choice Award (2018), winner for Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island
  • Bowness Photography Prize (2018), winner for Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island
  • Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture (2019), finalist, for Portrait of Shamindan & Ramsiyar Manus Island
  • Ramsay Art Prize (2021), Art Gallery of South Australia; finalist and People's Choice Prize, for Agonistes
  • Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship (2021), an award of A$160,000 given to mid-career creatives and thought leaders

Selected exhibitions

Solo

Group

Collections

Afshar's work is held in the following permanent collections:

  • National Gallery of Victoria: 8 works (as of 27 December 2024)
  • Monash Gallery of Art: 8 prints (as of 27 December 2024)
  • Art Gallery of New South Wales: 17 prints (as of 27 December 2024)
  • Monash University Museum of Art (Behold #1, Behold #6, and Behold #12)
  • University of Queensland Art Museum (Remain)
  • Murdoch University Art Gallery: (Westoxicated #7, Westoxicated #9, Westoxicated #3, Westoxicated #1, Westoxicated #5, and Westoxicated #4)
  • Buxton Contemporary (University of Melbourne) (Westoxicated #1, Westoxicated #2, Westoxicated #4, Westoxicated #5, Westoxicated #6, Westoxicated #7, and Westoxicated #9)
  • Deakin University Art Collection
  • Art Gallery of Western Australia (Remain)
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