Hoda Afshar | |
---|---|
Born | 1983 (age 40–41) |
Nationality | Iranian |
Known for | documentary photography |
Notable work | Remain (2018) |
Awards | National Photographic Portrait Prize (2015), Bowness Photography Prize (2018) |
Website | hodaafshar |
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 [update] Afshar teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne. [1] [2]
Afshar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1983, [1] four years after the Iranian Revolution. [3]
Initially hoping to study theatre and become an actor, but she was only granted her second choice, photography, at university. [3] She earned a bachelor's degree in fine art (photography) with first class honours [2] at the Azad University of Art and Architecture in Tehran. [1] During her studies and subsequently, she photographed many of her friends' theatre performances, coming to realise that photography was essentially theatrical too. [3]
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] From 2005 to 2006, Afshar worked as a photojournalist for Hamvatan newspaper in Tehran. [2]
She moved to Australia in 2007, [1] 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. [2]
From 2013 to 2021 Afshar lectured at the Photography Studies College in Melbourne. [2]
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. [3] [4]
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 2019 Afshar completed her PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, with the subject of her thesis being "images of Islamic female identity". [1] [2] In 2019 and Afshar started teaching at the Victorian College of the Arts and Photography Studies College in Melbourne. [1] [2]
Afshar was the subject of a Compass program on ABC Television in 2019. [11]
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. [12] [13] 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". [14]
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] [15]
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. [16] [17] 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. [3] A book of the same name was published to accompany the exhibition. [18]
She is a board member of the Centre for Contemporary Photography. [19] [2]
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. [3]
Afshar's work is held in the following permanent collections:
The City of Monash is a local government area in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne with an area of 81.5 square kilometres and a population of 200,077 people in 2016.
The Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), established as the National Gallery of South Australia in 1881, is located in Adelaide. It is the most significant visual arts museum in the Australian state of South Australia. It has a collection of almost 45,000 works of art, making it the second largest state art collection in Australia. As part of North Terrace cultural precinct, the gallery is flanked by the South Australian Museum to the west and the University of Adelaide to the east.
Matthew Sleeth is an Australian visual artist and filmmaker. His often collaborative practice incorporates photography, film, sculpture and installation with a particular focus on the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of new media. The performative and photographic nature of media art is regularly highlighted in his work.
Anne Zahalka is an Australian artist and photographer. Her work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, State Library of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Australia. In 2005, she was the recipient of the Leopold Godowsky Award at the Photographic Resource Centre in Boston.
Susan Fereday is an Australian artist, writer, curator and educator. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne. She was born in Adelaide, South Australia.
The National Photographic Portrait Prize is an annual portraiture competition held at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia.
The Manus Regional Processing Centre, or Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (MIRCP), was one of a number of offshore Australian immigration detention facilities. The centre was located on the PNG Navy Base Lombrum on Los Negros Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea.
Susanne Helene Ford was an Australian feminist photographer who started her arts practice in the 1960s. She was the first Australian photographer to have a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1974 with Time Series. A book of her portraits of women 'A Sixtieth of a Second' was published in 1987. Her photographs and eclectic practice was displayed in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2014.
Ruth Maddison is an Australian photographer. She started photography in the 1970s and continues to make contributions to the Australian visual arts community.
The William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize is an Australian prize for photography awarded by the Museum of Australian Photography. The prize first awarded in 2006. The prize money for the award in 2017 is A$30,000
Ponch Hawkes is an Australian photographer whose work explores intergenerational relationships, queer identity and LGBTQI+ rights, the female body, masculinity, and women at work, capturing key moments in Australia's cultural and social histories.
Kate Just is an American-born Australian feminist artist. Just is best known for her inventive and political use of knitting, both in sculptural and pictorial form. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public art projects that tackle significant social issues including sexual harassment and violence against women.
Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer living in New Zealand. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one month visa to New Zealand expired and he remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020, at which time he became a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.
Aldona Kmieć is an Australian contemporary artist working in Photography and Installation Art. Her works are held in public collection of State Library of Victoria, Museum of Democracy at Eureka in Ballarat, Ballarat Arts Foundation and private collections.
Robert Ashton (1950) is an Australian photographer and photojournalist.
Jacqueline Mitelman is an Australian portrait photographer.
Angus McDonald is an Australian contemporary visual artist, refugee advocate, columnist, and documentary filmmaker.
Cherine Fahd is an Australian artist who works in photography and video performance. She is also Associate Professor in Visual Communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia and has published in academic journals, photographic and art publications, and in news and media. Her work has been shown in Australia, Israel, Greece and Japan. She has received numerous grants, and has been awarded residencies in India and in Sydney at Carriageworks.
Rozalind Drummond is a photographic artist. Australia.
Sue Pedley is an Australian multi-media artist known for site-specific artworks in Australia and overseas. She has participated in residencies including the Bundanon Trust Creative Research Residency in 2016, the Tokyo Wonder Site in 2012, and the 2008 International Sculpture Symposium, Vietnam. Pedley works solo and in collaboration with other artists.
This interview was originally published in Artist Profile , Issue 45, 2018
Expires: Sat 27 Apr 2024.Afshar talks about Agonistes.