In this presentation, Hoda Afshar (Iran), Myriam Boulos (Lebanon), Yelena Yemchuk (Ukraine) will discuss their work in response to historic and ongoing conflict in their native countries. Rejecting traditional forms of documentary and photojournalistic practice, these artists are finding new creative strategies for ‘covering conflict’ and creating unique bodies of work, both personal and political, which form acts of protest and resistance.”

At the intersection of conceptual, staged and documentary image-making, Hoda Afshar’s artistic practice explores the representation of gender, marginality and displacement. Initially drawn to the potential of the documentary image to unearth hidden realities, she is equally committed to critiquing the collusion between the photographic medium and hierarchies of power. Informed by her own experience with migration and cultural displacement, Afshar’s work takes the intrusiveness of the camera as a point of departure to unpack the relationship among truth, power and the image while disrupting traditional image-making conventions.
Myriam was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of 16, she started to use a small camera to get closer to reality. She graduated with a master’s degree in photography the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She has taken part in both national and international collective exhibitions, and her work has been published in Aperture, FOAM, Vogue, Time, and Vanity Fair, among other publications.
In 2020 Myriam co-founded and became the photo editor of Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine that publishes literary and visual content on the works, interests and strife of women in her region.  In 2021 she joined Magnum as a nominee.

Yelena Yemchuk is a Ukrainian artist working in photography, film and painting. Born in Kyiv, Yelena immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was eleven.

She studied fine art at Parsons NY and photography at Art Canter in Pasadena. Yemchuk has exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide. She has worked with the New Yorker, New York Times, Another, ID, Vogue and others.

Yemchuk released her first photo book Gidropark, (Damiani) in 2011, followed by ANNA (United Vagabonds) 2017. Yemchuk had her first institutional debut with her project Mabel, Betty & Bette, a photography and video work at the Dallas Contemporary Museum in 2019. A monograph with the same title was released by Kominek Books in 2021. In 2022 Yelena released two photo books Odesa (GOST ) and YYY (Depart For l’Image). She is currently working on a new Edition Patrick Frey photo book Malanka coming out winter 2024 with Edition Patrick Frey.