Perspectives: Hoda Afshar

Pricing: Free entry

Location: Hawke Building – LEVEL 5, UniSA City West campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide, MAP

Presenter: Hoda Afshar

Hoda Afshar:
Unmaking Images – Image Making and Representation

In this lecture, Hoda Afshar discussed the connection between images and representation, and asked how the medium of photography might be used to untangle them. Retracing the history of her own practice, Afshar recounts how the camera has served her as a tool for exploring issues of identity and marginality, both as a documentary photographer in Iran, and as part of her visual-art practice after migrating to Australia.

Focussing on the themes and approach of her most recent series, ‘Behold’, recently shown at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography, and ‘Remain’, made on Manus Island in collaboration with Berhouz Boochani and recently exhibited as part of the MCA’s Primavera 2018, Afshar explained how her concern to share the stories of others has necessarily overlapped with her questioning of the limits of image-making, all the while acknowledging its real potential to reshape how we see the world.

Perspectives: shaping the world through visual culture.

HODA AFSHAR was born in Tehran, Iran (1983), and is now based in Melbourne, Australia. She completed a Bachelor degree in Fine Art– Photography in Tehran, and recently completed her PhD thesis in Creative Arts at Curtin University.  Through her art practice, Hoda explores the nature and possibilities of documentary image-making. Working across photography and moving-image, she considers the representation of gender, marginality and displacement. In her work, Hoda employs processes that disrupt traditional image-making practices, play with the presentation of imagery, or merge aspects of conceptual, staged and documentary photography. Hoda’s work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. She’s also a member of ‘eleven’, a collective of contemporary Muslim Australian artists, curators and writers whose aim is to disrupt the current politics of representation and hegemonic discourses.

Hoda Afshar website
Press: Art Guide Australia, Hoda Afshar wins William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize 2018
Hoda Afshar, the individual, and their story
Instagram: @hodaafshar
Interview with Hoda Afshar, National Photographic Portrait Prize 2015

Images (L-R) Hoda Afshar. Photograph Alex Torcutti; Hoda Afshar, Untitled #4 from the series Behold 2016. Image courtesy the artist.