I was born in Tehran, Iran, and I am now based in Melbourne, Australia, where I practice as a visual artist. I completed a Bachelor degree in Fine Art– Photography in Tehran and began my career as a documentary photographer in 2005. I am currently a PhD candidate in the department of Art at Curtin University, and a lecturer at Photography Studies College in Melbourne.
In 2006, World Press Photo selected me (as one of the top ten young documentary photographers in Iran) to attend their Educational training program. Since 2007, my work has been widely exhibited both locally and internationally and published online and in print. I also won the 2015 National Photographic Portrait Prize in Australia.
Through my photographic practice, which tests the boundaries between staged and documentary photography, I reflect on issues related to representation, displacement, and identity politics. My artwork aims to open lines of communication in a world both homogenized by global economy and unsettled by mass migration.
In The Exodus, I Love You More
In the Exodus, I love you more is an ongoing photographic series that I began in 2014. It is a record of my changing vision of, and relationship to, my homeland, Iran:
a relationship that has been shaped by my having been away, by that distance that increases the nearness of all the things to which memory clings, and which renders the familiar… strange, and veiled.
It is an attempt to embrace that distance and to turn it into a kind of seeing. To let what is both there and not there shine through the surface. To let the surface speak. It is an attempt to explore the interplay of presence and absence in the history of Iran and in Iranians’ lives, and to discover the truth that lies there in their never-ending meeting, in-between.
To view more of Hoda’s work please visit her website.