The Fold by Hoda Afshar

A face half-seen, a body cut by the frame.
What does it mean to look, and to be looked at?
The Fold unsettles a colonial archive,
turning fragments into sites of resistance.

The Fold examines how colonial and Orientalist photography continues to shape the representation of veiled Islamic bodies. Iranian artist Hoda Afshar works with the archive of French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), who in the early 20th century produced thousands of photographs of veiled women in Morocco. Intended to serve his theories on desire and concealment, these images were also deeply entangled with the colonial gaze.

Encountering the archive at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Afshar discovered that the museum’s digital system cropped the images automatically. She embraced this flaw, using darkroom printing and digital manipulation to fracture the photographs further. The resulting works erode their original authority, exposing the power relations embedded in acts of looking and in the long misrepresentation of the veil.

Afshar’s approach is shaped by her own history in post-revolutionary Iran, where the veil has been both a site of resistance and a tool of control. By reworking de Clérambault’s archive, she unsettles these competing claims and forges a third space of critique and reclamation. The Fold gathers more than 960 of these silver gelatin prints, accompanied by new writings and conversations that extend the dialogue beyond the images.