Kunsthal Thy Presents Surge by Yalda Afsah

Rituals hold their own grammar separate from ordinary conduct. What is permitted within the frame of ceremony operates by different rules than what would be permissible outside it, rules the participants carry in their bodies rather than their reasoning. The frame itself is the permission.

What film does to ritual is introduce a second camera: one that does not belong to the ceremony, does not share its grammar, and therefore cannot not notice what the participants already know how to not see. Afsah's practice sits precisely at this threshold, not to expose or condemn, but to hold the moment in duration long enough for the viewer to feel what orientation usually spares us from feeling.

Communities contain their own forms of force inside ceremony. Afsah seems less interested in whether that force is justified than in the fact that it has always been present, patient, inherited, and practically invisible.

Surge opens at Kunsthal Thy inside a raw timber-framed barn, the exposed beams, earthen floor, and corrugated roof constituting a space that mirrors the material logic of both films without ever announcing the connection.

The venue is itself one of Denmark's oldest farms, Dovergaard, in South Thy. Thy's agricultural history runs beneath this exhibition without needing to be explained. The region's farming population worked with horses as indispensable animals; turnips were reliable food in years of uncertain harvests. Placing Afsah's videos here means the viewer brings context that pre-exists any curatorial framing. The barn does not illustrate the work. It activates it differently than a white cube could.

Curro (2023) opens with distance, a vast hillside, wild horses being driven together, an observing audience at the edge of the scene. The scale holds everything safely separated. That distance collapses in stages. The camera finds two men restraining horses in close physical embrace, each holding an animal still long enough for its mane and tail to be trimmed.

The horses' distress registers in small adjustments: shifted weight, muscle tension, the particular alertness of an animal that cannot run. What the men are performing is craft and tradition. What the body of the horse makes visible is something the ritual frame asks everyone present not to dwell on.

Afsah separated the sound from its original recordings and reattached it in post-production, ambient noise that hovers at the edge of fit, breathing that seems to arrive from just outside the frame, sounds that do not quite confirm what the image shows. The viewer's perceptual system keeps reaching for orientation and keeps not quite finding it. That sustained uncertainty is the film's formal argument.

Jarramplas (2025) begins in darkness with detonations that seem festive and threatening in the same moment. Daylight reveals a crowd in the streets of Piornal, Spain, dense, moving with collective intelligence, throwing turnips at a figure whose identity the film withholds. That figure is the Jarramplas, a performer dressed as a cattle thief protected by armor who is symbolically expelled from the town each January. The crowd surges and contracts, loosens and re-densifies. When it stills, every gaze turns toward the same invisible center. The target remains offscreen. Afsah's camera stays on the crowd, the throwing arms, the ducking bodies, the faces carrying the expression of people doing exactly what is expected of them.

Afsah has described her practice as anthropological, though neither film offers interpretation. The formal decisions, separating sound from image, holding the camera at measured distance, allowing duration to accumulate, produce a kind of perceptual friction. The viewer is placed in the position of someone trying to understand a ceremony from its outward form alone.

Whether the ceremony is a horse-trimming in Galicia or an annual expulsion in Extremadura, the structural question seems to be the same: what does a community need to not know about what it is doing, in order to keep doing it?

The barn in Thy holds the question without answering it. What the ceremony cannot see is what sustains it.

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