Hoda Afshar’s photo series Aura engages with and subverts the legacy of The Family of Man, the 1955 exhibition curated by Edward Steichen and composed of over 500 photographs from 68 countries. Premiering at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before touring internationally, the exhibition’s optimistic post–World War II humanism is contrasted in Aura with fragmented images of contemporary crisis, including the pandemic, bushfires, wars, and racial injustice, as encountered primarily through digital screens.
Rather than affirming a vision of universal unity, with Aura Afshar zooms into smoke, shadows, and collective online experiences to evoke a shared sense of anxiety and a ghostly form of connection. Drawing on the structure of Steichen’s iconic exhibition – a global assemblage of documentary images emphasising common humanity – Afshar reimagines it for the digital age, foregrounding suffocation, isolation, and the blurred boundaries between reality and its images. The inspiration behind the project comes from a short story by the Iranian novelist Sadeq Hedayat, »Sayeh Roshan« (Chiaroscuro), which describes a future society in which the light of human progress casts its own shadow; a society in which humans are unable to touch, love or communicate, except virtually.
Aura in Afshar’s words:
»A suffocating smoke has enveloped the city. The sky is burnt black and orange. The sun is barely visible. You can barely breathe, even here in the city. Bushfires are burning across eastern Australia, and images of bright red waves devouring everything play on every television.
The pictures merge with the blurred image of the burning wreckage of a car carrying an assassinated Iranian army general, killed by a US airstrike in Iraq. We wait for Iran to retaliate. State television broadcasts images of missiles striking a US airbase. We wait. Images emerge of the burning wreckage of a passenger plane, shot down by mistake. Images of protestors filling the streets. Of burning flags and teargas.
A virus is now spreading across the globe, like those unstoppable fires in Australia. Iran is defenseless. Countless dead already. More images. Of makeshift graves and white shrouded bodies. Of doctors collapsed on packed hospital floors. Of ghost-like figures giving orders. Separated by cold-blue cloth and see-through screens. Our only means of connection. Unable to touch each other. Unable to breathe. Unable to breathe.
The image of an innocent man pleading to police sparks protests across America. Police are sent in rows to smother them. Smoke. Fire. Destruction. A factory catches fire in Lebanon. The explosion sends red smoke spiralling towards heaven. The shock is felt in Palestine. In Palestine. Where fire has again descended from the sky. And where a mother, arms outreached to heaven, pleads. When will this end?«
CTM 2026 Exhibition
24.1. – 22.3.2026 | Free entry
daadgalerie & Kunstraum Kreuzberg