Through a combination of photographs, drawings, mirrors, videos and sound installations, Afshar explores the history of established perspectives and photography as a tool of revelation and resistance.
The Fold, at the centre of the exhibition, is a sustained investigation into the enduring legacy of colonial photographic practice, and the ways in which they continue to shape how bodies, particularly veiled Islamic bodies, are seen and consumed. Working with the archive of French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), Afshar encountered thousands of photographs he made in Morocco.
Hoda Afshar, from the series The Fold (2019-2025)
Through photographing veiled women, and occasionally men, de Clérambault explored his psychoanalytic ideas around covering and fantasy. Using the recurring motif of the mirror, Afshar disrupts this historical archive and shifts the usual focus to turn things around, making the viewer, or the act of looking itself, the object of investigation and knowledge. She questions the violence of the gaze and exposes deeper issues concerning the nature of vision and control.
Get to know Hoda Afshar
Hoda Afshar is a visual artist whose practice focuses on the intricate relationships between politics and aesthetics, knowledge and representation, visibility and violence. She is interested in the ways that image-making can either reinforce or challenge our common sense, and the forces that shape perception. Her works invite audiences to reflect on and to rethink how and what we see, often by drawing attention to parts of the political and visible order that have previously been excluded.
Hoda’s work has been widely exhibited and published online and in print, and is part of numerous private and public collections. Hoda has received numerous prestigious art awards and prizes, and recently completed a one-year fellowship as part of the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Programme 2025-2026. Her first monograph, Speak the Wind, was published by MACK in London in 2021. Her second monograph, The Fold, was published by Loose Joints in 2025. She is represented by Milani Gallery in Brisbane, Australia.
