Afshar’s experiences as a young woman in Iran have shaped her artistic career in Australia, focusing her eye on the humanity within inhumane systems

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When Hoda Afshar was a teenager, coming of age in theocratic and authoritarian Iran in the 1990s, she and her friends were repeatedly arrested and physically punished by the “morality police”, for wearing their hijabs incorrectly in public and for attending underground parties. “They used to put a few of us in small solitary confinement cells together for a night or two, it was very common for my generation to experience that,” she says.

“We are part of the nasl-e sukhteh, or ‘burned generation’; the generation born after the 1979 revolution, who had to pay the price for many of the transformations and changes that happened.”

With a footprint of less than 40 sq metres, the Melbourne project required careful planning – and some spatial trickery

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Last week on a balmy spring evening, Ronnen Goren and his partner had dinner in a small pavilion on their terrace for the first time. Inside, an Aga stove was keeping their home warm. They could have retired to their sunken lounge room and cocktail bar for a nightcap, had the mood struck.

This domestic scene took place in a semi-subterranean former laundry in inner Melbourne – a space of less than 40 sq metres that was renovated at the end of 2024. On 29 October, the “exuberant” reimagining of the damp basement space in Toorak, on the grounds of the heritage-listed Quamby apartment complex, received the Emil Sodersten award for interior architecture at Australia’s National Architecture awards.

As the prestigious award marks its 30th anniversary, this year’s nominees consider hidden human labour, life in war-torn Ukraine and the Buddhist concept of rebirth

Once coveted for its clean lines and timeless design, the functional furniture is no longer seen as cool. Anyone for cottagecore and chrome?

“I definitely don’t think it is cringe,” says Laura Budds, a vintage furniture dealer based in Norfolk. “But I do think we have reached the peak, and we’re on the descent.” Budds is talking about mid-century modern furniture, which has recently come under fire from younger generations for being – like so many things, including trainer socks and high-waisted jeans – a deeply millennial aesthetic. As the Wall Street Journal declared: “Midcentury modern design has met the fate of pumpkin spice lattes, cocktails in mason jars, no-show socks, leggings and other aspects of millennial culture: it has become cringey.”

Budds, 44, is resigned to the fact that she is a “mid-century millennial”. She’s even made a career out of it: she sells furniture and vintage clothes at Williams & Parfitt, a modern antiques centre in Wymondham, Norfolk. But she says she has had to diversify in recent years to cater to changing tastes among younger customers, who are moving away from the “wall-to-wall mid-century” look beloved by the generation above them. She says of gen Z: “I don’t think they are so bound by the eras or designers – they just buy what they like. They aren’t afraid of older antiques and will have a bit of whimsy or taxidermy.”

The National Gallery of Victoria presents the first major Australian solo exhibition of the Melbourne artist, whose work references African studio photography, family archives, Catholic imagery and science fiction, while paying tribute to the myths and traditions of Dinka Bor culture in South Sudan.

Passage: The Art of Atong Atem will run from Friday until 14 June at the Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square. Entry is free

• Keeping it real: the vivid photography of Atong Atem – in pictures