Hoda Afshar’s multiple award-winning works have broken new ground for the art of image-making internationally in their technical brilliance and striking content. Afshar’s art presents forceful challenges to the way we see and understand the movement of peoples and their relationships to space and place. She speaks truth to power and gives voice to the marginalised. Extending the impact of documentary image-making, Afshar works across both photography and the moving image and invites audiences to confront political, physical and emotional displacement through the interplay of bodies, architecture, fabric and landscape.
The people captured in her art include those marginalised or persecuted. The powerful portraits in Remain emerged within a video installation collaboration with asylum seekers incarcerated on Manus Island, PNG—including Behrouz Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer, and filmmaker. Her multi-modal, award-winning Agonistes portraits and video illuminates the courage of whistle blowers calling out misconduct and wrongdoings in Australian institutions. And, In the Exodus, I love you more—selections of which are displayed in this exhibition— Afshar records her changing bonds to her homeland, Iran—its beauty, history and distance from Australia.
The dramatic images below reflect not only her artistry and technical skill and her values but also her diverse career in communicating across fields to many audiences. During her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Azad University of Art and Architecture in Iran, she worked as a photojournalist for Hamvatan newspaper. After moving to Australia in 2007 she shared her knowledge with students at Curtin University of Technology where she finished her PhD in Creative Arts (2019). Her engagement with teaching continues in her role lecturing in Photography Studies at Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Afshar is also a member of ‘Eleven’—a collective of contemporary artists, writers and curators amplifying dynamic conversations about Muslim Artists in Australia.
We invite you to explore Afshar’s powerful artworks depicting the people and landscapes of her homeland, Iran, where its cities were key trading hubs of the ancient Silk Roads.
“In the exodus, I love you more is an ongoing photographic series that I began in 2014. It is a record of my changing vision of, and relationship to my homeland, Iran: a relationship that has been shaped by my having been away, by that distance that increases the nearness of all the things to which memory clings, and which renders the familiar… strange, and veiled. It is an attempt to embrace that distance and to turn it into a kind of seeing. To let what is both there and not there shine through the surface. To let the surface speak. It is an attempt to explore the interplay of presence and absence in the history of Iran and in Iranians’ lives, and to discover the truth that lies there in their never-ending meeting, in-between.” – Hoda Afshar
Hoda Afshar, from the series In the exodus, I love you more (2014 - Ongoing). Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.
The title of the series In the exodus, I love you more is a quote from the poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Artist Biography
Hoda Afshar was born in 1983 in Tehran, Iran and lives and works in Melbourne.
In her artwork, she explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making by working across photography and the moving-image. Afshar employs processes that disrupt traditional image-making practices, play with the presentation of imagery, or merge aspects of conceptual, staged and documentary photography. Afshar’s work to date considers the representation of gender, marginality, and displacement.
Recent exhibitions include: We Change the World, National Gallery of Victoria (2021); PHOTO International Festival of Photography, Melbourne (2021); Between the Sun and the Moon, Lahore Biennale (2020); Remain, University of Queensland Museum of Art (2019); Defining Place/Space, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego (2019) and Primavera 2018, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
Her awards include: the National Portrait Gallery’s National Photographic Portrait Prize (2015), the Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art (2018), and the People’s Choice award of the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia (2021). Hoda is represented by Milani Gallery in Australia.
