Hoda Afshar: Remain, made with the men held on Manus Island

Remain

Remain was made in collaboration with several of the men who remained on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea six or more years after leaving their homelands to seek asylum in Australia, and being sent instead to the remote offshore detention centre. The collaboration is structural rather than credited courtesy: the men retell their individual and shared stories themselves, through staged images, words and poetry.

The work comprises still and moving images, voice recordings and text. What it bears witness to is not a single event but a condition — the death of friends and of dreams of freedom, set against the strange air of beauty, boredom and violence that surrounds the island. Holding those registers together is the formal problem the work solves, and it is why the images are staged rather than observed: a documentary photograph of indefinite waiting tends to record only the waiting.

The moving-image component, a single-channel digital video of twenty-four minutes with colour and sound, was completed in 2018. The series was exhibited as Remain at the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane in 2019.

The men are named in the work as collaborators rather than subjects, and that decision resolves a problem specific to this material. Offshore detention is a subject about which almost every published image was made either by the authorities or from outside a fence, and both positions produce pictures that describe a policy rather than the people held under it. By handing the account to the men themselves — in poetry, in recorded voice, and in images they helped to stage — the work escapes the choice between spectacle and abstraction.

Testing what documentary images can do

Afshar was born in Tehran in 1983 and lives and works in Melbourne, where she is a visual artist and also lectures in photography and fine art. Her stated concern is the nature and the possibilities of documentary image-making — a question she pursues by working across photography and moving image rather than settling in either.

Within that frame she considers the representation of gender, marginality and displacement. Remain sits at the point where all three converge, which is why the decision to hand narration to the participants reads as a methodological position rather than a courtesy.

Exhibitions, collections and prizes

Her work has been widely exhibited in Australia and internationally, published online and in print, and is held in numerous private and public collections. Recent exhibitions at the time of the feature included Beyond Place at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego in 2019, Primavera 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and Waqt al-tagheer: Time of Change at ACE Open in Adelaide in 2018.

In 2015 she received the National Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, and in 2018 she won the Bowness Photography Prize at the Monash Gallery of Art.

Two things follow from that list. The first is that Afshar's recognition came from art institutions rather than from press awards, which fits work that arrives as installation — video, voice, text and photographs shown together — rather than as a picture story. The second is that a project made about a policy the Australian state was actively defending was acquired by Australian public collections while the detention it documents was still running, which is a rarer outcome than it sounds.

For an archive concerned with funding, Remain is also a reminder that the most expensive part of some projects is not production. Access to people held in offshore detention is a matter of trust built over time and of legal and logistical friction, and neither of those appears as a line in a budget.

The choice to work across still image, video, voice and text is likewise a decision about evidence rather than a stylistic spread. Each medium carries a part of the account the others cannot: the staged photographs hold the men's self-presentation, the recorded voices hold testimony in the speakers' own cadence, and the poetry holds what neither reportage nor interview format would admit. Shown together as installation, the parts corroborate one another the way documents in a case file do — which is the closest a gallery work can come to the evidentiary weight that journalism claims and, on this subject, was largely unable to deliver from outside the fence.