The Fold. Hoda Afshar

The Fold is a visual and psychological investigation of the French psychiatrist and photographer Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault (1872–1934). The project originated during research at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, where Hoda Afshar encountered an archive of thousands of images taken by de Clérambault in Morocco of veiled Islamic women—and sometimes men—through which he sought to explore his psychoanalytic ideas about covering and fantasy.

Marking the first time Afshar has drawn upon an archive in her work, The Fold explores the enduring legacy of Orientalist and colonial photographic practices. It is an investigation into the regimes of perception and control that determine what we see and how we see.

The Fold comprises multiple components that employ distinct visual strategies and artistic techniques, ranging from traditional silver mirroring and darkroom hand-printing to digital animation. The present iteration of the work includes a video and a reinterpreted installation of the photographic components.

The photographic component—displayed here through projections and the book—was created when Afshar discovered that the museum’s online archive automatically cropped de Clérambault’s images upon downloading. Afshar extends this degradation into an embedded commentary. Through darkroom printing, scanning, and digital manipulation of these fragments, she ruptures their original intent and transforms them into a space of resistance. Her interventions turn the gaze back on itself—inviting viewers to question the power dynamics woven into the act of looking, and to confront the cultural biases projected onto the veil.

The video work opens with a digital animation depicting Clérambault’s death. On the verge of going blind, Clérambault committed suicide on 17 November 1934 by shooting himself while facing a mirror. Newspaper articles at the time reported that he was surrounded by “a strange collection of wax models that he enjoyed dressing with rare fabrics.”

Hoda Afshar’s film continues with a series of interviews in which researchers from various disciplines propose hypotheses about the figure of Clérambault, sometimes contradicting one another. The interviews are filmed within a set inspired by the house-of-mirrors sequence in The Lady from Shanghai (1947), directed by Orson Welles, symbolizing the complexity of multifaceted characters.