Prison System's Cold Machinery Faces Indigenous Children

At Buxton Contemporary, Hoda Afshar’s exhibition a/part presents accounts of incarceration from children aged nine to 18, alongside prison staff and inmates describing detention-centre conditions. One child says they’ve been incarcerated five times, for periods ranging from a month to a year. When staff are short, warders initiate “night mode,” locking inmates in pitch-black rooms for days. The paperwork has a name. Children live with the consequences.

Afshar spent nine days at YETI (Youth Empowered Towards Independence) facilities in Cairns, meeting children and photographing them with an analogue large-format camera. “They are absolutely extraordinary in what they do,” she said of YETI. “I think they should be a model for the entire country. To be honest, working with them restored my hope in humanity.” The source describes YETI’s work with young people but gives no funding details.

Children Against the Paperwork

The exhibition’s first room presents self-anonymised portraits of Indigenous children. Flowers, hands and clothing cover their faces; one child wears full Joker make-up, and more than one gives the camera the finger. These aren’t portraits designed to make the young subjects compliant or easy to identify. They keep something for themselves.

Afshar said the images push back against a camera’s history of dehumanising the people it records. “Often these stories are framed in a way that it denies the subject the right to beauty. For me, beauty is a method to rehumanise, to give agency and humanity back to the people who have been historically dehumanised through the lens of the camera.” The portraits make up one half of Code Black/Riot (2025), which she made with Behrouz Boochani, an Iranian journalist and refugee incarcerated on Manus Island for six years, and Vernon Ah Kee, an artist and member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples.

Boochani described the children’s experience as “complex corridors [and] cold processes and paperwork that entangle them in a twisted, mechanised labyrinth that leads nowhere”. Beside that account, a four-channel video work—expanded to eight screens for its Melbourne premiere—presents staggered interviews with staff and inmates describing detention-centre conditions.

The Codes Behind the Walls

The work’s colour system draws on prison emergency codes. Yellow means officer assistance required; purple means external threat; pink means self-harm. Vernon Ah Kee’s colour-field paintings explain the codes, while “code black” means riot. The arrangement turns institutional control into a palette. The accounts show what it means for people held inside.

Outside the facilities, the video shows rainforest, cool water and birdsong. Birds also feature in accommodation-unit names: Heron, Kingfisher, Cassowary, Magpie, Hawk and Sandpiper. Boochani recognised the naming convention from Manus Island, where authorities sent him twice to solitary confinement in a unit named after the island’s distinctive native bird, the chauka. Afshar said people weaponise beauty and connection to land. “It can’t be an accident,” she said. “It’s like a textbook used all over, which continues to become more and more complex over time.”

Stories Beyond the Cell

Upstairs, Remain (2018) presents stateless men on Manus Island, including Boochani. Agonistes (2020) depicts nine whistleblowers who have faced professional and personal persecution since speaking out; their digital facial scans look like brass busts. The exhibition includes children in detention, stateless men and people punished for speaking out.

In Afshar’s video Shafaq شفق, still images from a 2026 trip in the Northern Territory accompany her narration. She described controlled burning, smoke and fighter jets overhead as the US began bombing the Persian Gulf. “The imagery was identical, but the reality was different,” she said. “People were cheering the jets. It was very jarring. I was in tears. One person’s suffering is another’s entertainment.”

Afshar said the prison sits within an Australian city beside the ocean, with the natural environment just beyond its walls. “The fact that we live with these realities and choose not to see it is very much of the reality of this country,” she said. The subjects of Code Black/Riot are Indigenous, she said, but the work isn’t only an Indigenous story: “All of these are Australian stories that demand an Australian solution. It’s our responsibility as citizens to think about others.” a/part is at Buxton Contemporary until April 24.