For Galerie Molitor’s first presentation at Art Basel Statements, German-Iranian artist Yalda Afsah will premiere HEAT, a new short film focused on Taitung’s Blasting Handan Festival, the third work in a trilogy examining rituals as social and emotional practices. Her most ambitious film to date, the film marks Afsah’s first major project in Asia and first time exhibiting in Switzerland. Afsah’s enigmatic and captivating films represent a unique voice within today’s moving image landscape, managing to meld reflection on urgent topics of belonging and violence with thoughtful ambivalence. The Art Basel presentation will be concurrent with a solo exhibition at Ca’Buccari, Venice, Italy and follow recent institutional solo exhibitions at CCA Berlin, Germany (through April 2026) and Kunsthal Thy, Denmark (through May 2026).
Working with first-hand footage of the festival shot earlier this year in which people expose themselves to the danger of exploding firecrackers in a commemoration of a Military God of Wealth, Afsah pays special attention to reciprocal dependencies: Why do we turn to old belief systems and rituals in times of uncertainty, and what do we expect from them in return? Her films explore the significance of rituals on various levels: as a means of collective self-affirmation, as an expression of cultural identity, and as an ambivalent form of social control. She is particularly interested in physical performance and the tension between individual action and collective choreography. Her films speak to the latent violence harbored by tradition, and the ways control, domestication and initiation shape masculinity—and perhaps human society as a whole.
In this ritual practice, throngs of people parade through day and night in protective gear, immersed in a cacophony of exploding firecrackers. This physically intense gathering appears as a choreography of light, sound, and resistance, in which fear, faith, and collective ecstasy converge. It is said that the festival commemorates Zhao Gongming (1562 – 1066 BCE), a Shang dynasty general who became known as the Military God of Wealth (or Marshal Zhao in Taoist tradition). As Marshal Zhao disliked the cold, people would throw firecrackers at him during his inspection tours to keep him warm. But such details are absent in Afsah’s filmmaking, as she crafts a disorienting and elusive narrative instead, homing in on moments of visual intensity, accentuated by a soundscape that foregrounds intimate exchange within the din of the crowd. It is as if she taps into the energy of the heaving masses, the raw drive of those who compose it, in her slow, succinct and often hypnotic filmmaking. Concerned with the collective readiness to use violence, Afsah’s observation of this cascading spectacle – as threatening as it is theatrical – equally implicates its audience in a reflection on the violence of spectatorship.
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