Through the Fourth Wall

Accompanying Yalda Afsah's exhibition Temper, public historian Prof. Dr. Thorsten Logge (University of Hamburg) will speak about history-making as a communal practice. Building on the concept of the “fourth wall,” the lecture will examine the relationship between performers and their audiences and explore how history and meaning emerge in the moment of encounter.

Yalda Afsah’s filmic works bring together rituals, performative acts and collective practices without imposing unambiguous narratives. Instead, they open up spaces of experience that arise from the interplay of staging, perception and interpretation. Thorsten Logge will examine this as a form of subjective meaning-making—and thus also of history-making: every act of viewing is inextricably linked to one’s own experiences, memories and body of knowledge.

Drawing on the works JARRAMPLAS, PAN and HEAT, presented in the exhibition, the lecture will trace connections between the various performative situations and examine how community emerges through storytelling, repetition, and performance. It will focus on those gaps, gestures and symbols that elude a single, unambiguous interpretation and unfold their meaning only in the exchange between the work and the audience. The lecture approaches the exhibition as a place where aesthetic experience and the construction of historical meaning converge—as a space in which history is not presented as a closed chapter, but as something that is constantly being renegotiated.