The central theme of German-Iranian artist and filmmaker Yalda Afsah (born 1983 in Berlin) is the complex relationship between humans and animals. In her work, she explores various forms of domestication, focusing on the blurred boundaries between care, affection, intimacy, and tenderness on one hand, and power, submission, dominance, and control on the other.
The exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum is the artist’s first in Lower Saxony and presents groundbreaking films across three rooms that explore different forms of domestication: pigeon flight art (SSRC, 2022), horse training (Curro, 2023), and bullfighting (Tourneur, 2018).
Starting from a documentary perspective, her films and video installations seem to both portray and fictionalize the human and animal protagonists. Afsah captures their mutual dynamics in symbiotic choreographies on screen, raising the question of how filmic techniques contribute to the construction of the filmed space. Viewers are invited to reflect on alternative forms of interspecies coexistence.
More information here.