Hoda Afshar: a/part

The University of Melbourne's Buxton Contemporary has unveiled a major solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Hoda Afshar. The exhibition premieres Afshar’s new video work, Shafaq, and presents an expanded installation of her recent work Code Black/Riot (2025), alongside significant earlier works. 

Titled a/part and curated by Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums, and Shanysa McConville, Associate Curator, Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne, the exhibition brings together key photographic and video works spanning Afshar’s practice. It marks her first solo exhibition of this scale in Melbourne, where she lives and works. 

Afshar’s practice examines the forces that determine who is permitted to speak and be seen, and who is excluded from the political order. In a/part, her works foreground the experiences of people affected by systems of detention and institutional power, prompting audiences to question how these systems are understood and accepted. 

Central to the exhibition is Afshar’s major work Code Black/Riot (2025), developed in collaboration with artist Vernon Ah Kee and writer and human rights defender Behrouz Boochani. Filmed on Ah Kee’s Country in North Queensland, this work draws attention to the incarceration of Indigenous young people in Australia. The multi-channel video installation was developed with the support of First Nations-led advocacy organisation Change the Record and Youth Empowered Towards Independence (YETI). Through testimony, moving image and collective authorship, including interviews with young people and detention centre staff, the work draws attention to the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth in Australia. 

Alongside the video work are Afshar’s photographic portraits of young people with lived experience of incarceration, who were invited to conceal their identities while making a personal statement. Ah Kee’s accompanying nine-panel colour-field painting draws on the emergency codes used in detention and related institutions, while Boochani’s text reflects on his experience of more than six years inside the Australian government-run Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea, and the parallels he sees with the incarceration of Indigenous people in Australia. 

Code Black/Riot (2025) is co-commissioned by Buxton Contemporary and the Biennale of Sydney, with the original work premiering at the 2026 Biennale of Sydney: Rememory. 

Afshar’s new work, Shafaq premieres in a/part. A single-channel video and poetic visual essay, it reflects on the experience of watching war unfold in her homeland while separated from her family. Made while travelling, the work traces how the distance between Afshar’s two worlds (Iran and Australia) seemed to collapse as signs and traces of war appeared in the landscape around her. Birds, clouds, planes, circles and sounds take on new meanings, reflecting a reality that may be invisible to others. The title refers to the reddish glow of the sky after sunset, or evening twilight, and also evokes a threshold, a period of transition or temporariness, and the blood of desire and longing. The work was written by Afshar and Melbourne-based musician and educator Timothy Johannessen, who also designed the sound. 

Together with earlier projects, the works in a/part examine how systems of detention and institutional power shape people’s lives, bringing forward the experiences of individuals whose stories are often overlooked. 

Curated by Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums and Shanysa McConville, Associate Curator.