W hen Hoda Afshar was a teenager, coming of age in theocratic and authoritarian Iran in the 1990s, she and her friends were repeatedly arrested and physically punished by the “morality police”, for wearing their hijabs incorrectly in public and for attending underground parties. “They used to put a few of us in small solitary confinement cells together for a night or two, it was very common for my generation to experience that,” she says.

“We are part of the nasl-e sukhteh , or ‘burned generation’; the generation born after the 1979 revolution, who had to pay the price for many of the transformations and changes that happened.”

These formative experiences left the artist with an ongoing sensitivity to injustice, and an interest in incarceration, marginalisation and state violence. They have also amplified her appreciation of the rights and freedoms she now enjoys as a citizen of Australia, where she migrated in 2007, then as a lapsed photojournalist and emerging artist.…