An eerie stillness lies over the rural small town of Piornal in south-western Spain – veiled buildings, police patrolling the empty streets, and strangely, large piles of turnips adorning the sidewalks; the calm before a storm. Yalda Afsah’s short film Jarramplas (2024, 15 min.) unfolds around the otherworldly scenario that follows: Large crowds have gathered in the streets for a fight whose intent and opponent remain obscure. Afsah focuses on the mostly teen-aged participants’ individual, adrenaline-fuelled expressions, as they proceed to forcefully throw turnips and other vegetables towards an unknown target, rather than revealing the larger objective of the mass. Throughout the film, it remains unclear whom the crowd is raging against, a common opponent or each other; the demarcation of the front lines is blurred. Concerned with the collective readiness to use violence, which sets in as soon as there is a legitimising framework for it, Afsah’s careful observation of this cascading spectacle – as threatening as it is theatrical – equally implicates its audience in a reflection on the violence of spectatorship.

CURRO (2023) explores the ritualized taming of wild horses according to the Galician custom Rapas das Bestas, raising questions about the social construction of masculinity, dependence and alienation from nature through the act of “taming” in interspecies relationships. In the context of this form of domestication, in which the wild horses are herded out of the mountains into the valley to be sheared and marked by the “aloitadores” (gal. for fighters), the supposed assumption of responsibility for the animal contrasts with the forlornness and disorientation of the human protagonists as they wait in the wilderness; they seem to be, or feel, out of place, alienated from the natural landscape that surrounds them. The reciprocal dynamic of this sometimes violent encounter between human and animal in the arena (the so-called “curro”) is brought to a halt in unexpected positions of intimacy in the eponymous film.

A group of men is fixing their eyes onto the sky. High above, a swarm of pigeons is moving in an unrecognizable formation, when suddenly individual birds drop in mid-air, spinning backwards with their wings extended and tumbling down in a circular motion before resuming their ordinary flight path. Yalda Afsah’s short film SSRC slowly dissects this aerial choreography, revealing its nature as a form of animal training and gradually zooming into the at times almost intimate details of this interspecies relationship. Focusing on the specific social context of the Los Angeles-based „Secret Society Roller Club“ and its members’ identification with and through the animals, Afsah’s film negotiates positions of co-dependency and care, domestication and dominance – calling into question the ambivalence reflected in the symbol of the soaring bird free in its flight, yet simultaneously bound to human will.

An activity shaped by the physical relation between human and animal, the classical dressage of horses as portrayed in Yalda Afsah’s short film Centaur reveals an ambivalence between care and control, physical strength and broken will. Paired with recurring shots of historical paintings adorning the riding hall, Afsah’s intimate observations – abstractions of fur and flexing muscles in conjunction with a rhythmic layer of sound – evoke a sense of artificiality eerily similar to the aesthetic discipline of dressage itself, which seems to raise the controversial question whose nature is cultivated by whom.

The short movie Tourneur documents a bull fight in Southern France and subtly comments on the disparity between the young, adrenaline rushed participants and the physically superior animal, cornered by the adolescent men. The unpredictability of the situation is increased by foam flooding into the makeshift arena, which equally affects the participants’ and the audience’s view. In the opaque foam mass, the encounter between human and animal turns into a surreal and archaic performative act – as if it has slipped away from reality, it becomes its own abstraction.

Farahnaz is 13 years old and was raised as a “Bacha Posh” in Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan. According to this cultural practice, kids considered as girls are dressed as boys from their birth or a young age, and raised in this social “function”. Farahnaz consciously lives with the freedoms and duties of a boy in a society dominated by patriarchal traditions – from playing football to doing the groceries for the sister who is a single parent. The documentary film BOY tells Farahnaz’ story and parallely follows a 24-year-old Afghan in London who looks back on her childhood, similarly determined by this tradition. 

A film by Yalda Afsah and Ginan Seidl

The two-channel installation Bacha Posh is a multifaceted documentary focusing on the Afghan tradition of dressing girls as boys in order for them to be able to fulfil the function of a male family member. Framed by atmospheric shots of urban landscapes in Mazar-e-Sharif, Bacha Posh follows the life of 13-year-old Farahnaz, adding unexpected perspectives to the discourse around the social construction of gender. Presented on two screens, the work contrasts the private and the public, interior and exterior spheres.

In collaboration with Ginan Seidl

A temporary object in a public space. A building in Istanbul, provisionally covered with plastic tarp during construction works. The viewer’s gaze is directed by the movement of the wind occasionally lifting the plastic veil. In Yalda Afsah’s short film Kabatas, the framing becomes both a formal aesthetic element and a narrative strategy, as the fluid facade is shot without giving any sense of dimension or proportion. As in her other works from this series (Kabatas / Fillmore / Atlanten, 2012-13), fleeting insights into the inner workings of the building superimpose spaces of the private and the public, of intimacy and spectacle, of reality and fiction. 

Shot in San Francisco, Fillmore is a continuation of Yalda Afsah’s close observations of urban spaces. Covered by a white “canvas”, the portrayed building merges into the flat plane of the background, as electricity cables and traffic systems transform the foreground into a landscape of abstract lines. The sequence of images starts off with a close-up of the covered building, eventually transitioning into a long shot to establish the spatial relationship. Part of a series of three works (Kabatas / Fillmore / Atlanten, 2012-13), the short film offers only but glimpses into the pulsating interior of the clearly framed cityscape it observes.

Two parts of a viaduct breach out of a corner building otherwise entirely concealed by scaffoldings and white plastic sheeting. Left uncovered, the two arches reveal their contrasting architectural styles, breaking the pattern of the scaffolded facade’s abstract geometry. Set in Berlin, the scene is introduced with a pan shot. Afsah’s use of montage brings about a comparison between the old and the new, introducing an almost theatrical stage between past and present. Slowly closing in on detail, Atlanten performs a careful deconstruction of an urban landscape, much like Afsah’s other works from this series of short films (Kabatas / Fillmore / Atlanten, 2012-13) do.