a/part: Hoda Afshar

a/part presents a major solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Hoda Afshar. Known for work that explores the unspoken forces and structures that determine who is permitted to appear, speak and be heard, and who is excluded from the social and political order, Afshar challenges the divisions between participation and exclusion, prompting audiences to question the ways of seeing that sustain them, and to see differently.

Central to the exhibition is an expanded iteration of Afshar's major work Code Black/Riot (2025), a multi-channel video work developed in collaboration with renowned artist Vernon Ah Kee and writer and human rights defender Behrouz Boochani. Co-commissioned by Buxton Contemporary and the Biennale of Sydney, the work premiered at the 2026 Biennale of Sydney: Rememory. For its presentation at Buxton Contemporary, Code Black/Riot will be reconfigured as a large-scale immersive installation, with eight channels and a soundscape that audiences move through, amplifying the gravity and physicality of the work.

Code Black/Riot is accompanied by a series of collaborative portraits by Afshar of young people with lived experience of incarceration, invited to conceal their identities using a means of their own choosing while making a personal statement of strength and spirit. Alongside these are a group of colour-field paintings by Ah Kee, representing the detention centre's system of emergency codes, and text by Boochani reflecting on his more than six years inside the Australian government-run Manus Island Regional Processing Centre and the parallels he sees with the system of Indigenous youth detention.

The exhibition's earlier works extend these concerns, exploring themes of witnessing, displacement and the application of institutional power through the experiences of people whose lives have been shaped by systems of authority. Together, the works in a/part explore the impacts of systems of detention and questions of institutional power in Australia through the experiences of individuals whose stories are often overlooked.

Curated by Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums and Shanysa McConville, Associate Curator.

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