In her practice, Yalda Afsah explores how ritualized forms of violence and conformity build communities, and how contemporary anxieties materialize within them. The exhibition Still in the Dark at Ca'Buccari brings together two films and an installation facing the public park in front of the exhibition space. The works follow bodies caught in collective rituals that defy categories and unsettle the distinctions between agency and submission. The Ca'Buccari exhibition space, connected via its arcades to the public park and the lagoon, lies at the threshold between institutional rituals and the everyday life of the Sant'Elena neighborhood. Afsah's installation is situated in this liminal space: images are mounted on the institution's large translucent doors, gesturing towards the works that lie behind them. These are not film stills, but photographs taken on location. Hastily discarded clothes lie alongside meticulously arranged ones; both stripped of wearer and use—the bodies they once held are absent. Inside the exhibition space, the first moving image one encounters is Afsah's film Jarramplas (15 min, 2024). The film is situated in the rural town of Piornal in southwestern Spain, where, once a year, teenagers gather to take part in a peculiar happening. Large crowds assemble in the streets, armed with turnips and other heavy vegetables, ready to fight. The participants direct their focus toward a target that remains obscure, as Afsah keeps the opponent outside the frame. The participants, mostly teenagers, subject their bodies to a form of theatrical violence that serves no clear purpose; an excess that resists integration into any logic or definition sustained in a supposedly educated society. Attempts to trace the ritual's origins—to religious practice, local tradition, or symbolic performance—remain unresolved. What cannot be explained tends to be displaced into the realm of the irrational or into a past rendered distant enough to contain it. Perhaps this is why every era invents its own "dark age". Such projections reveal not the past itself so much as the point at which the present order begins to collapse. The "dark age" is less a historical condition than an epistemic device: a way of externalizing what can no longer be understood into a past dark enough to absorb everything. On a global scale, a process of intensification is currently unfolding: superstition and conspiracy theories, disintegrating systems and the resurgence of authoritarian male leaders. Turning to forms of premodernity says less about the past than about the instability and precariousness of the present. At its core, the promise of modernity was this: what you understand, you can control. It meant making the world comprehensible—through science, through technology, through the relentless ordering of things. And for a long time, this seemed to work, at least for some. Yalda Afsah confronts us with the crisis of that promise. Jarramplas captures the moment when violence and pain build community, and how closely these moments are tied to the construction of masculinity. Yet the violence that Afsah depicts is not limited to the scene itself. It extends to the act of watching, and as a viewer, one feels a sense of complicity that does not resolve. With the second film on view, PAN (20 min, 2026), Afsah turns to a place where a different form of community-building unfolds. Since 1920, thousands have gathered every August high up in the Bulgarian mountains near the Seven Rila Lakes to dance the Paneurhythmy together. The practice traces its origins to the teachings of the Bulgarian mystic Peter Deunov, who composed a collective choreography in which the individual surrenders to a higher purpose. Movement here is not an expression of the self but a medium; the individual is integrated into a rhythmic structure that aims for unity with an imagined universal law.
The annual dance creates a temporality beyond linear history; a cyclical order of time and space. The scene in the mountains is an ambivalent setting: on the one hand, it is a collective practice existing outside of common institutionalized faith; on the other hand, it is a structure that reinforces conformity precisely through its claim to natural harmony.
As in Jarramplas, the viewer encounters the limits of familiar categories. The distinction between "religious" and "secular" is not neutral; it is itself part of a system that determines which bodily practices count as rational and which are relegated to the archaic. Yet, here, these terminologies lose their legibility. Again, Afsah's work centers precisely on what the promise of modernity cannot account for: bodies that resist optimization, communities that evade categorization. Bodies situated within a world that claims to know everything and yet—perhaps precisely because of this—seek belonging in excessive and unruly rituals and repetitions.
Venice itself is shaped by recurring rhythms: the cyclical movement of the tides, the return of processions and masquerades. The Biennale is one of many repetitions in this city that, every two years, reenact a similar gesture of gathering: the promise that art negotiates something that transcends the individual—in this context, the act of viewing art seems to be driven by the same need Afsah explores: belonging to something larger than oneself, walking through an exhibition, lingering together in front of works. These too are excessive repetitions whose ritual dimension we have agreed to call secular—forms of collective practice whose meaning resists being fully rationalized.
This exhibition is made possible with the generous support of IfA – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen and the Biehler von Dorrer Stiftung.