Behrouz Boochani

This portrait of Behrouz Boochani by artist Angus McDonald foregrounds the humanity of its subject. Boochani, an award-winning Kurdish writer, poet, filmmaker and journalist, sought refuge in Australia after fleeing persecution in Iran. Yet under the Australian Federal Government’s offshore detention policy, he was detained on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until the detention centre’s closure in 2017. Without travel documents, he was forced to remain on the island, until New Zealand granted Boochani refugee status in 2020. That same year McDonald visited Boochani in Wellington, his new hometown, to paint this portrait.

McDonald captures Boochani’s steely yet calm expression in large-scale, hyper-realistic detail. This is not an image of a victim, as refugees have too-often been depicted in mainstream media. Instead it is Boochani’s strength and resolve that remain the focus. At the time this work was made, Boochani had yet to step foot on the Australian mainland despite garnering widespread respect and admiration from Australians for his vocal criticism of injustice, and despite receiving numerous awards for his memoir No Friend Buy the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).

This work was a finalist in the 2020 Archibald Prize and received the People’s Choice Award. Of this painting, Angus McDonald said in 2020:

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, poet, filmmaker and journalist who was held by the federal government for over six years as a refugee on Manus Island. We first made contact in 2018, while I was creating a documentary about Manus. Boochani recited in Farsi a poem he wrote about the detention centre for the film’s closing sequence. My first attempt to visit him on Manus in 2019 failed when the Papua New Guinea authorities intervened, seizing my passport and escorting me and my two companions onto the first flight back to Australia. After Boochani arrived in New Zealand last year I visited him for five days when he sat for the portrait.

I’ve depicted Boochani directly engaging the viewer as a strong, confident and peaceful man who survived a brutal ordeal and is now free. Boochani doesn’t view himself as a victim. Through his work he tirelessly struggled for years against the system that tried to humiliate him. In my view, it was he who humiliated them.