Hoda Afshar

The world is not being allowed to forget the plight of abandoned asylum-seekers on West Papua's Manus Island, through the work of Melbourne-based, Iranian-born artist Hoda Afshar. In April last year the filmmaker and photography met former inmates of the notorious immigration detention centre. One of Hoda's black and white photographs of Behrouz Boochani - a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, writer and filmmaker with an intense gaze - took out Australia's most important photography award, the Bowness Photography Prize They're also going on show as part of Auckland's Gus Fisher Gallery's next exhibition The Shouting Valley: Interrogating the Borders Between Us. Lynn Freeman spoke to Hoda Afshar, via skype from Amsterdam, to find out how she came to care about the asylum seekers on Manus Island. The Shouting Valley: Interrogating the Borders Between Us opens at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland on Saturday.