Hoda Afshar

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.

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, and began her career as a photographer in 2005. During her studies and subsequently, she photographed many of her friends' theatre performances, coming to realise that photography was essentially theatrical too.

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

In 2019 Afshar completed her PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity".

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.

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

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 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 Fitzroy), 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 started teaching at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne.

Afshar was the subject of a Compass program on ABC Television in 2019, and in the same year was a judge for the National Portrait Gallery's National Photographic Portrait Prize.

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).

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. 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 awhite dove before releasing it. This is based on a kind of ritualistic practice amongKurdish female fighters before setting out to fight Islamic State. The photographs are a response to the killing ofMahsa Jina Amini in Iran in September 2022. A book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition.

Current positions

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

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

• 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

• Speak the Wind (Mack, 2021; photographs by Hoda Afhsar; essay by Michael Taussig) 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. 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”.

Solo

• Behold (2017), Centre for Contemporary Photography
• Remain (2018–9), consisting of a video and a series of black-and-white portraits, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; University of Queensland Art Museum
• Agonistes (18 February – 7 March 2021), St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne
• 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
• A Curve is a Broken Line (2 September 2023 – 21 January 2024) Art Gallery of New South Wales

Group

• Primavera (2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
• Enough خلص Khalas: Contemporary Australian Muslim Artists (2018), UNSW Galleries
• Women in Photography 2019: Remedy for Rage (2019), Objectifs
• The Shouting Valley (2019), Gus Fisher Gallery, (2020) The Physics Room
• Just Not Australian (2019), Artspace Visual Arts Centre
• Defining Place/Space: Contemporary Photography from Australia (2019), Museum of Photographic Arts
• Civilization: The Way We Live Now (2019), National Gallery of Victoria
• Refracted Reality (2020), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
• f_OCUS (2020), Counihan Gallery
• The Burning World (2020), Bendigo Art Gallery

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

• National Gallery of Victoria (Remain, Untitled #5, Untitled #4, and Untitled #3)
• Monash Gallery of Art (Untitled #4, Untitled #1, and Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island)
• Art Gallery of New South Wales (Remain, Ibrahim Mahjid, Behrouz Boochani, Emad Moradi, and Ari Sirwan)
• 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)