Yalda Afsah: Temper

Whether it be spiritual ceremonies, seasonal festivities or rituals of initiation and transition – customs and rites count among humanity’s oldest collective practices. They foster temporary communities, help structure emotions and enable forms of belonging that often defy rational explanation. At the same time, they can be closely connected to marginalization, disciplinary power and violence.

In her latest series of works, Yalda Afsah navigates precisely within this area of tension. She explores rituals and their role as social and physical choreographies, in the scope of which universal questions of power, identity and community come to the fore. In her solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the films JARRAMPLAS, PAN and HEAT are presented together for the first time. Based on research into local ritual practices in Spain, Bulgaria and Taiwan, the works examine how societal orders and collective emotional states manifest themselves in performative acts.

While JARRAMPLAS follows a ritual in the Spanish mountain village of Piornal as an ambivalent interplay of collective aggression and spectatorship, PAN unfolds as a multi-layered choreography blending spirituality, physical discipline and community in the Bulgarian Rila Mountains. Yalda Afsah’s new film HEAT, which is shown in an institutional context for the first time, is devoted to the Taiwanese Bombing of Master Handan Festival. Here, the artist turns her attention to an ecstatic ceremony that combines an affirmation of faith, a test of courage and ritual purification to create a sensually condensed experience of light, sound and corporal sensation.

Yalda Afsah observes these processes with great intimacy and, at the same time, with critical distance, revea

ling how fragile and contradictory the systems are that produce communities. The exhibition thus introduces a precise artistic exploration of customs as collective expierences in the present day.

Curated by Anna Nowak

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