Hoda Afshar is an Iranian documentary photographer based in Melbourne. She is known for her 2018 prize-winning portrait of Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani, who suffered a long imprisonment in the Manus Island detention centre.
The Fold is a visual and psychological investigation of the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934).
Afshar during research at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris came across an archive of thousands of images taken by de Clérambault in Morocco of veiled Islamic women—and sometimes men. He collected these images to explore his psychoanalytic ideas about covering and fantasy.
However there is controversy surrounding his photographs and his psychiatric work. Through the film, ‘inspired by the house-of-mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), directed by Orson Welles, and the complexity of multifaceted characters’.
Afshar captures a through a series of interviews with researchers from different disciplines a range of hypotheses about the figure of Clérambault, often contradicting one another.
This is a compelling story told through research, interviews, film and photographs.
‘The Fold explores the enduring legacy of Orientalist and colonial photographic practices. It is an investigation into the regimes of perception and control that determine what we see and how we see’.
Here in Madrid ‘The Fold’ appropriately takes place in La Casa Encendida a social and cultural space that is a ‘meeting point accessible to all people, where contemporary creation coexists with educational activities, reflection and debate around Culture, Solidarity, the Environment and Education.’
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