Award-winning photographer lets once-incarcerated teens tell their own story

In late 2023, artist Vernon Ah Kee contacted Iranian-born Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar and writer and human rights defender Behrouz Boochani with an invitation to work on a project to address the mass incarceration of Indigenous youth in Far North Queensland.

Ah Kee, who was born in Cairns, and belongs to Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples, stressed the issues his community faced were "too big, too hard to deal with" alone.

Although Indigenous children aged 10 to 17 make up only 6 per cent of the population, they are 20 times more likely to be imprisoned. 

Ah Kee said he wanted to build "forms of solidarity and communities that could help us fight these systems", Afshar recalls.

A year later, with the support of Change The Record, an organisation that works to reduce incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Youth Empowered Towards Independence (YETI), which works with Indigenous youth caught up in the criminal justice system, Afshar had established a temporary portrait studio in YETI's backyard in Cairns.

All she needed was subjects.

Framing matters

"Nine days I stayed in the area, returning every day, to set up the big, large-format camera in that backyard," she says.

Over time her subjects, who rely on YETI for a range of support services, were drawn to Afshar, her camera and the props she brought in.

"Eventually they started engaging," asking me, 'Can I help you? Can I take a photo? Can I be your assistant?'" she says.

Those photographs became the basis of Code Black/Riot (2025), now on display at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, in the exhibition a/part: Hoda Afshar.

The show, a product of a co-commission by Buxton Contemporary and the Biennale of Sydney, brings together three series, Agonistes (2020), Remain (2018) and Shafaq (2026), which confront themes such as "incarceration in contemporary Australia".

In Code Black/Riot, the subjects have used Afshar's props, which include fresh flowers, a handmade mask, Heath Ledger's iconic Joker make-up, and a piece of clothing or an outstretched arm from someone outside the frame, to remain anonymous to the viewer. 

Through that simple act they retain agency over their own image.

"So much changes in the way that we frame things, in the way that what we leave outside of the frame and what we include in it," Afshar says.

In one photograph, a young man, and a senior member of the cohort Afshar photographed, is draped in an Aboriginal flag. Apart from one eye peering back at us, his face is concealed. In another, a young man holds a mask of Melpomene, the teary-eyed Greek symbol of tragedy, to replace his own.

Going 'night mode'

In the next room is the companion piece, a four-channel video installation displayed across eight suspended screens. Their lived experience is so "complex and layered" that their "testimonies are lost" in the static photographs, Afshar says. The video "is a way of bringing that narrative forward, of confronting people with that reality".

The 33-minute video installation begins with vignettes of children sitting in the boughs of jacaranda trees that bathe the gallery in a warm tropical glow. However, this soon makes way for images of a coastal town with orderly streets, manicured lawns and a sprawling youth prison on its outskirts.

Current and former prison staff paint an unforgiving portrait of life inside the facility, including the various colour codes used by staff to describe incidents involving inmates; "Code olive is when they climb," one says.

A moment later a young boy readies himself for his interview. "Can you see my whole face or just my mouth?" he asks. Although only 14 years of age, he's been incarcerated five times, including once for over a year. 

Presently his voice is joined by other anonymous young people, who detail physical assaults by prison guards and prolonged periods of "night mode", when the prison is plunged into near total darkness. 

A former female inmate berates the prison guards' treatment of inmates.

"Would they go home and do that to their own children?" she asks.

Looking at whistleblowers

Upstairs the exhibition continues with Agonistes (2020), which features portraits of whistleblowers: former employees or members of private, public and religious organisations, who made the decision to speak out after witnessing or experiencing violence, abuse and corruption.

The whistleblowers include community and military lawyers, care workers, a general practitioner and two former employees of the Australian government's refugee processing centre at Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

To protect their identity Afshar has photographed sculptures printed from scans of their heads and shoulders. Hung in a row on a red, painted wall, these busts take on the appearance of a court of noble leaders carved from marble.

In the accompanying video the whistleblowers divulge the miscarriages of justice they witnessed and outline the motivation behind their decision to speak out. "What I left behind at Manus, I often felt I was in my own prison anyway," one says.

When the Australia government closed the Manus Island facility in 2017, many former detainees remained on the island as they awaited resettlement. It was during this period that Afshar flew there to meet and photograph some of these men. 

It took time to "build up that relationship," Afshar recalls.

"We were cooking together, sharing our stories together, we cried together a few times."

The resulting series of photographs became Remain (2018), 11 of which are included in a/part, along with a two-channel video installation. 

In one image, her longtime collaborator Behrouz Boochani stares back at us as a small fire rages behind him; in another water is poured over a former detainee's head as an outstretched arm sits on his shoulder.

Ambitious new direction

According to Afshar, what connects the three series is the "process of dehumanisation" that is "used against certain people and bodies and skin colours that has led us to this moment and allows this to happen" in our own backyard.

Shafaq (2026) is a singe channel video installation featuring images the artist took in the Northern Territory last year. "It's the most personal work I've made because it came at a time I wasn't even planning to make it," Afshar says.

US military strikes against Iran meant she was unable to contact her family who were at the "centre stage of the war", she says.

During a ceasefire she travelled to the Northern Territory, only to find herself in a landscape that bore a striking resemblance to parts of southern Iran.

As fighter jets flew overhead in Operation Pitch Black, a joint military exercise between Australia and its allies, "It really started feeling like the world inside me is reflected in the world outside," Afshar says.

Shafaq is the most introspective work in the exhibition and marks a new direction for the artist.

a/part: Hoda Afshar is on at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne until April 24, 2027.