Australia / Iran, Visual Arts, 2025, in Berlin
Hoda
Afshar

To “frame the world within a limited stage” is how Hoda Afshar described the fascination that theater held for her from a young age. Embedded within an ethos of reinterpretation, the stage offered the possibility to envision reality, unfettered, while simultaneously invoking the imagination and memory of the audience. Moving past her desire to become an actor, Afshar remains committed to the theatrical image as a possibility. In her photography practice, she probes how much performance the medium can hold before it either ruptures or results in a radical expression of familiar realities.
However, while she considers the challenge of stretching the conventions of image-making to be valuable, for Afshar, the current flexibility of truth itself is alarming. In the present moment—where selective historicization and the unmasking of the Western liberal artifice have revealed a hierarchical order of rights for certain individuals above others—Afshar’s practice speaks on behalf of those against whom narrativization is weaponized. She identifies her practice as centered by a morality—one that is neither relative nor negotiable, particularly as it incorporates questions of marginality and justice.
Many of Afshar’s chosen concerns lie with those at the precipice of persecution: whistleblowers in Australia; men seeking asylum imprisoned on Manus Island; Iranian women braiding each other’s hair under the blue sky; community and landscape possessed by the wind. Often, those at the other end of Afshar’s gaze face a potential risk—be it violence from the State or dominant ideologies. It is this marginality that informs the collaborative performances that define her practice—those facing these realities enact their own narratives, embodying the philosophy of self-determination. Momentarily, her collaborators are freed of the weight of their suffering and seen for their moral position, not restricted to the facts of their potential incarcerations.
Tracing a line of sight through Afshar’s practice reveals an allegiance to addressing the violence inflicted on vulnerable people and communities. However, in a world where the circulation of trauma carried through images of violence is on a continuous, mediatized loop, each of Afshar’s works attempts to construct an emancipatory aesthetic. For this, she uses the language of the documentary photograph as a familiar conduit, with which she attempts to confront popular perceptions—be it the Western gaze on the bodies of Muslim women or the media’s framing of the body of the refugee. For Afshar, medium specificity is crucial here, as she relies on the affective potential of realism to communicate with the public at large.
While disrupting long-standing representational traditions of vulnerability and trauma, Afshar’s images reveal a constant tussle with visibility—bringing narratives that have been historically shrouded into the public eye, while at the same time resisting their reduction into easily legible records that reference familiar visual tropes. In working with visibility, Afshar also practices a refusal, rejecting how certain communities have been framed through the imperial shutter. For her, narrative is equally embedded amid that which is concealed; it reveals itself beneath the layers of that which is visible.
Despite her engagement with disquieting themes, each of her works radiates beauty—not the kind of romantic pictorialism evident in the colonial fetishization of “other” lands and people, but rather a use of the aesthetic to provide dignity. Here, it is a strategy—to move against the tendency to evidence trauma and injustice by reproducing violence in the image—particularly for those “who have been denied the right to beauty.”
Text: Tarvi Mishra