YALDA AFSAH
29 September, 2024
In my artistic practice as a filmmaker, I am interested in exploring the extent to which filmed space becomes a construction through cinematic means. This formal characteristic is conceptually mirrored in my recent works on various social, oftentimes inter-species, dynamics. Departing from a documentary focus, my films and video installations seek to portray and fictionalize their human and animal protagonists alike, capturing their symbiotic choreographies on screen and revealing inherent ambivalences within these reciprocal relationships. My recent works share a focus on human rituals and ritualized encounters with the animal. Using examples of locally-specific bullfighting, classical horse dressage, pigeon breeding, or the taming of feral horses, my films both reveal and complicate the demarcations between ‘nature’ and its cultivation. Reflecting on the condition of the enclosure, always at the root of domestication, my works aim to evoke a reflection about positions of co-dependency and care, dominance, dependence and alienation from nature – as well as about finding purpose through collectivity, kinship and symbiosis. Finding formal means that raise questions about construction and objectivity, while preserving the possibility of the viewers’ subjective observation, ultimately my works interrogate the relation between subject and object, the observer and the observed.
HOW IS YOUR WORK INFLUENCED BY THE CIRCA 2024 MANIFESTO?
My film CURRO focuses on a moment of intimacy in a context otherwise marked by brute force: Wild horses are herded out of the mountains into a valley to be sheared and marked. In the moment “after” the taming it appears as if two of the men were hugging while they embrace the animal’s face to keep it calm. The reciprocal dynamics of a violent encounter are brought to a halt in an unexpected position of intimacy here, urging us to consider our fundamental vulnerability to each other, and proposing the possibility of an overarching empathy.
WHAT WOULD YOU CREATE/DO WITH THE £30K CIRCA PRIZE?
The prize would enable me to begin work on a new film series in which I would like to explore the performance and social context of various human rituals and ceremonial practices. It is my aim to observe and find a visual language for these practices’ leitmotif of becoming one with nature and finding meaning through collectivity – a motif that I have encountered in various, ambiguous forms in my artistic exploration of interspecies relationships.
FOLLOW YALDA AFSAH ON INSTAGRAM
Vote for this artist
SCREEN LOCATIONS
From 1–30 September 2024, each CIRCA PRIZE 2024 finalist will have their work appear consecutively throughout the month at 20:24 BST on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, whilst also broadcasting across a global network of screens in Berlin and Milan.
LONDON
Watch the CIRCA PRIZE 2024 every evening from 1 – 30 September at 20:24 BST on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights screen.
BERLIN
Watch the CIRCA PRIZE 2024 every evening from 1 – 30 September at 20:24 CEST on the Berlin Limes Kurfürstendamm screen.
