Untitled #15, from the series Speak the wind

Hoda Afshar is one of Australia’s most innovative and unflinching photomedia artists. Deeply engaged with the politics of image-making, her practice is a form of activism as much as an artistic inquiry. Through work that is emotionally sensitive yet morally resolute, Afshar doesn’t simply alert us to injustice, she compels us to care.

Iranian-born, Melbourne-based Afshar has long been attentive to the way images shape our understanding of the world. She knows all too well how the camera has been used as an agent of control and how photography is implicated in histories of imperialism. As a countermove, Afshar uses the camera to tell stories from the inside and impart visibility to those from whom it has been denied. All the while, she remains aware of the ethical implications at play, establishing a dynamic tension between what is revealed to and concealed from the viewer.

The wind is an invisible force that is only made extant through its impact – through billowing fabric or waves that skirt the surface of the sea. But the wind as it appears in photographs from Afshar’s 'Speak the wind' series is more than a physical presence. On the islands off the southern coast of Iran, in the Strait of Hormuz, where Afshar produced this body of work between 2015 and 2022, the wind – known as the Zār – is thought to be a malevolent force capable of inducing illness or disease. Those possessed by the Zār are exorcised through rituals involving incense, music and dance. Like the wind itself, these customs are only alluded to obliquely in this series.

Over time, the landscape of these islands has been shaped by the Zār; the rocks have been eroded into bulbous, undulating forms. Images from this series such as Untitled #9 dramatise the surreal terrain, while others such as Untitled #18 evoke a spectral presence that locals have seen in the islands’ trees. But this series also harbours other spectres. It is thought that the beliefs about the Zār were inherited from those brought to Iran from Africa as slaves. Here, as elsewhere, Afshar addresses violence and brutality not through blunt imagery but through subtle evocation and lyricism.