Yalda Afsah

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

In her latest series of works, the German-Iranian artist 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, she is for the first time presenting the films JARRAMPLAS (2024), PAN (2026) and HEAT (2026) together. Based on research into local ritual practices in Spain, Bulgaria and Taiwan, the works examine how societal orders and collective experiences 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. Her new film HEAT, which will be 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.

The exhibition thus introduces a precise artistic exploration of the ways in which customs function in the present day: as practices that form a sense of belonging and identity – and, at the same time, as ambivalent spaces in which emotions are collectively being released.

Curated by Anna Nowak