Even at a young age, Hoda Afshar was fascinated by theater – a space in which reality can be rethought and combined with the power of imagination. This sensibility still shapes her artistic practice today, which moves between the poles of representation, truth and performativity. She is not interested in theatrical staging, but in a radical visual language that conveys familiar realities in a new way. However, she is not interested in theatrical effects, but in a radical visual language that critically questions dominant ideologies and opens up new perspectives on the familiar.
Hoda Afshar’s work addresses power relations, the exclusion of marginalized voices and the political dimensions of pictorial narratives. In a time of selective historiography and crumbling liberal facades, she uses photography as an ethical and affective tool – one that resists relativism and insists on responsibility. Her images give space to those who suffer under state violence or dominant ideologies: Whistleblowers, refugees, Iranian women. In close collaboration with them, she creates staged tableaux that become places of agency and self-empowerment
In a deliberate interplay between visibility and denial, Hoda Afshar questions stereotypical representations. She does not use documentary language to reproduce trauma, but as an aesthetic means of making dignity visible – especially for those who are often denied the right to beauty.