Remain looks at individuals caught in a double bind—refugees who fled their homelands only to be confronted with the hostile border regime of Australia. These men arrived as asylum seekers, in the hope of a better future than the one they escaped which included persecution, wars and violent racial attacks. Instead, they were detained and transferred to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea—one of Australia’s infamous offshore immigration centres known for indefinite detentions and human-rights abuses.
This series of portraits was made in collaboration with several men who were on the island in 2018, six years (or more) after they left their homes. The process involved recounting stories and reviving memories of experiences that are as hard to remember as they are to forget. For Aref, the separation from his family was harder than life on Manus, while Edris said the nightmare on the island had become as terrible as the one he fled. When asked to pick an element from nature for the portrait, Emad picked soil. “It reminds me of land; the land that I was torn from; the land that has been torn from me. From us.” While soil is one of the most central elements of Kurdish culture and identity, he followed it up quickly to say, “I have been stateless my whole life.”
In the face of the harsh force of State power that left many of these men to languish, it was brotherhood that helped them survive through years of incarceration. When asked what he would do when he is free, Edris, who arrived on the island when he was only eighteen, went silent and said, “I don’t know how freedom feels. I haven’t even seen it in my dreams yet.”
Hoda Afshar is a visual artist and documentary maker from Iran 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 perception.
Working across photography, video, archival materials, text, and sound, she also employs techniques such as 3D photography and printing, as well as mirror-making, often in collaboration with participants to disrupt traditional approaches.
Afshar has exhibited widely, with work held in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, KADIST, and the National Gallery of Victoria, among others. Afshar’s awards include the National Photographic Portrait Prize, Bowness Prize, Ramsay Art Prize, Hood Medal, and a 2025 DAAD Berlin fellowship.
