Hoda Afshar’s The Fold takes as its starting point the vast archive of Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934), a French psychiatrist and photographer who, in the early twentieth century, produced thousands of images of veiled women—and sometimes men—in Morocco. De Clérambault originally used these photographs to support psychoanalytic theories around fantasy, covering, and desire, filtered through a deeply colonial lens. Afshar encountered them during research at the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. For the first time in her practice, she engages directly with an archival body of work.
Having discovered that the museum’s online archive automatically cropped de Clérambault’s images upon downloading, Afshar furthers this degradation into an embedded commentary. By darkroom printing and digitally manipulating these fragments, she ruptures their original intent and transforms them into a space of resistance, turning the gaze back on itself and inviting viewers to question the power dynamics woven into the act of looking. The book gathers more than 960 of her silver gelatin reappropriations, each a gesture of reworking, refusal, and critical reflection.
Born after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Afshar came of age in a society where the veil had become a central symbol in the negotiation of political and cultural identity. At the heart of her engagement with the archive is a recognition of how the Islamic female body has long been instrumentalised to serve competing ideologies: unveiling was used to justify imperial conquest, while re-veiling became a symbol of resistance yet has also been enforced by state authorities for coercive ends. Through reworking these colonial images, Afshar navigates this entangled history, forging a third path that critiques both external and internal forms of domination.
The Fold includes essays by Ali Behdad and Annabelle Lacour, and a conversation between Taous Dahmani and the artist. Published by Loose Joints in partnership with the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, it accompanies Afshar’s solo exhibition Hoda Afshar. Performer l’invisible at the museum (30 September 2025 – 25 January 2026). The bilingual English and French edition runs 228 pages with 435 monotone plates, as an oversized stitched booklet with an octuple-folded debossed cover, edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon and the artist.
