Iranian Australian artist Hoda Afshar: ‘What I care about is human life and human dignity.’ Photograph: Adam Ferguson/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Iranian Australian artist Hoda Afshar: ‘What I care about is human life and human dignity.’ Photograph: Adam Ferguson/The Guardian Art and design Interview The beautiful, shocking work of artist Hoda Afshar: ‘I don’t take freedom of speech for granted’ Dee Jefferson Afshar’s experiences as a young woman in Iran have shaped her artistic career in Australia, focusing her eye on the humanity within inhumane systems
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Prefer the Guardian on Google W hen Hoda Afshar was a teenager, coming of age in theocratic and authoritarian Iran in the 1990s, she and her friends were repeatedly arrested and physically punished by the “morality police”, for wearing their hijabs incorrectly in public and for attending underground parties. “They used to put a few of us in small solitary confinement cells together for a night or two, it was very common for my generation to experience that,” she says.
“We are part of the nasl-e sukhteh , or ‘burned generation’; the generation born after the 1979 revolution, who had to pay the price for many of the transformations and changes that happened.”
These formative experiences left the artist with an ongoing sensitivity to injustice, and an interest in incarceration, marginalisation and state violence. They have also amplified her appreciation of the rights and freedoms she now enjoys as a citizen of Australia, where she migrated in 2007, then as a lapsed photojournalist and emerging artist. “I grew up under a system that didn’t give me freedom of speech, or equal rights as a woman, so I don’t take it for granted,” she says.
View image in fullscreen Hoda Afshar: ‘Iran’s struggles and our movements are often hijacked and used for other political purposes and ends.’ Photograph: Adam Ferguson/The Guardian But it has also made her more sensitive to Australia’s human rights and social justice failures: “Australia claims beautiful values. It is the country of a ‘fair go’, that wants everything equal for everybody. But rights are not distributed equally.”
“From the beginning, I was very excited to be able to critique authority; to be a responsible citizen in a society where we can fight for change,” she adds.
This combination of lived experience and strongly held values has resulted in some of the most vivid, urgent and achingly beautiful works of Australian art seen in the last decade – several of which are brought together in a/part, her new exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Buxton Contemporary
The show brings together three projects that deal with what she calls “states of exception”, a term coined by the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben for “sites where the laws that are applied to normal citizens don’t apply or can be broken,” Afshar says.
View image in fullscreen Afshar’s Code Black/Riot on display at Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne. Photograph: Christian Capurro For each project, she has created video and photographic portraits that foreground the humanity of her subjects, while interrogating the narratives that underpin each state of exception; the ways of depicting a marginalised person or group that make it possible to accept their disenfranchisement.
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