English Word - PRIX PICTET HUMAN Artiste Photographe Hoda Afshar " Speak the Wind, 2015–20" Biography
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| PRIX PICTET HUMAN Artiste Photographe Hoda Afshar " Speak the Wind, 2015–20" Biography |
Born Tehran, Iran, 1983
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Speak the Wind, 2015–20
In the islands of the Strait of Hormuz, off the southern coast of Iran, a distinctive local culture has emerged as the result of many centuries of cultural and economic exchange.
Central to this culture is a belief in the existence of winds — generally thought of as harmful
— that may possess a person, causing illness or disease. A corresponding ritual practice involves a hereditary cult leader, who speaks with the wind through the afflicted patient in one of many local or foreign tongues in order to negotiate its departure.
Beliefs about these winds are rarely openly discussed, whether its because some are suspicious or because some believe language has the power to manifest the invisible. The existence of similar beliefs and practices in many African countries suggests the cult may have been brought to Iran from southeast Africa through the Arab trade of enslaved people. This project documents the history of these winds and the traces they have left on these islands and their inhabitants —
a visible record of the invisible, seen through the eye of the imagination.
Biography
Afshar began her career as a photographer in 2005 and completed her BA in fine art photography at Islamic Azad University, at the Faculty of Art and Architecture, Tehran, the following year. She moved to Australia in 2007 and received a PhD in creative arts at Curtin University, Perth, in 2019.
Exhibitions have included the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan (2022), her solo exhibition Speak
the Wind, shown at Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, as part of the PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, and Thinking Historically in the Present at Sharjah
Biennial 15 (2023).
Prizes won by Afshar include the National
Photographic Portrait Prize, awarded by the National
Portrait Gallery, Canberra (2015), and Monash Gallery of Art’s Bowness Photography Prize (2018). In 2021, she won the People’s Choice Award in the Ramsay Art Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. She was awarded a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship the same year. Afshar’s works are held
in collections including the V&A, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Art Gallery of South Australia, University of AucklandArt Collection, New Zealand, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and Art Gallery of NewSouth Wales, Sydney.
Afshar’s first monograph, Speak the Wind, was published by MACK in London in 2021.
She lectures in photography and fine art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
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PRIX PICTET HUMAN Artiste Photographe Hoda Afshar " Speak the Wind, 2015–20" Biography
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