Yalda Afsah at JOAN

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Yalda Afsah, Curro (film still) (2023). 2K, color, and sound, 30 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Two men strain to hold down a horse, their arms locked tightly around each other, foreheads pressing together. They seem to look everywhere but at each other, gesturing at the scene around them and yelling to others who are working to shear off the horse’s mane with brutal force, leaving jagged and uneven tufts of hair like a marker of conquest. The camera lingers just long enough so that the violence could be mistaken for intimacy, as if the two men were in a prolonged embrace. This scene is part of Yalda Afsah’s newest film Curro (2023), recently shown in the artist’s solo exhibition Eye to Eye at JOAN, which featured two films about ritualized encounters between humans and animals. Curro spotlights the centuries-old Galician festival Rapa das Bestas, in which herds of local wild horses are driven from the hills and corralled into an arena where they are sheared and dominated into submission. Though the tradition has drawn controversy as a form of animal abuse,¹ Afsah’s lens throughout Curro softens the brutality of the event. Her wide, slow-panning shots move away from the horses, who are densely packed and clearly agitated, to instead focus on the human actors. Deliberately paced and edited so that the sound of their commotion is almost inaudible, the resulting footage yields a meditation on the taming of animals as a masculine rite of passage. The film prompts questions about what separates human from animal, and how that separation is enforced. Who is taming who? And how can we live and coexist with animals that are, as critic John Berger wrote, “both like and unlike” us?² Afsah’s films delve into the ambiguous duality of the human-animal relationship, pointing to how domestication intertwines care and companionship with dominance and control.

The second film in the exhibition, SSRC (2022), portrays the Secret Society Roller Club. Based in Compton, the club gathers amateur breeders and enthusiasts of the roller pigeon, a breed domesticated for their ability to tumble mid-air. Captured in cinematic slow-motion, the birds’ flight in the film feels symbolic, almost spiritual. A single pigeon soars against a clear blue sky, followed by the entire flock. One by one, they begin to roll as if falling from the sky, only to catch themselves in perfect somersaults. The men below are gathered in complete silence—not just looking, but beholding—their faces upturned, beatific. Snippets of dialogue and interviews are interspersed with long, drawn-out shots. In one scene, a man quietly strokes a pigeon cupped in his hand and notes, “I’m not holding her at all.” She, in return, leans against his body in comfort, clearly used to being handled, and lets him extend her wing for several minutes as the camera records every ruffle of her feathers. The final shot shows the flock taking off from their loft, the door wide open, the birds free to fly and return at their own volition.

The way these two films were juxtaposed at JOAN— projected on opposite sides of two large screens installed back-to-back, with one playing after the other— created a dichotomy, as if presenting two halves of the same whole. In this reading, Curro suggests the relationship between human and animal as one rooted in physical dominance and power. Here, it is the men at the center of the film’s narrative, wading into the midst of the herd, roughly pushing upon flanks as if moshing at a concert. There is bravado in their jockeying to be seen by one another in a collective performance of masculinity, while the animal serves as a mere backdrop. SSRC functions as its ideal counterpart, proposing instead a relationship of mutual care and independence. It is only through their patience, gentleness, and long-term commitment toward the roller pigeons that the club members achieve their desired results. Even when the scene appears to be about men, the birds are still at the center —as the men take bets and talk amongst themselves, their hands trace the graceful arc of the pigeons’ flight paths. It would be simple to idealize one and demonize the other, but the nuance of Afsah’s films belie any easy categorization. There are moments of tenderness and connection to be found in Curro—a smile exchanged after someone perhaps cracks a joke, a cheek resting against another’s shoulder, an arm offered in support—just as there are moments of hardness and isolation in SSRC. In one scene, a young boy loses interest in the pigeons and looks instead to the grown-up standing in front of him. When the man doesn’t pay him any mind, too intent on the birds, the boy learns to be silent and watch, too. Unlike the raucous, communal activity portrayed in Curro, the experience of the men in SSRC is one of interiority and isolation.

Afsah’s films ultimately remind us that, as Berger posits, looking at animals can help us see ourselves. “If the first metaphor was animal, it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric. Within that relation what the two terms—man and animal—shared in common revealed what differentiated them. And vice versa,” he wrote.³ In other words, it is through, and often against, our understanding of what constitutes animality that we construct our definition of humanity. Afsah reveals that, through the process of domesticating animals, we are also caught within the web of traits that make us both human and animal—dominance, control, compassion, and connection among them—ourselves not-quite-human, and not-quite animal.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 35.

Yalda Afsah, SSRC (film still) (2022). 2K, color, and sound, 20 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Yalda Afsah, Eye to Eye (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Yalda Afsah, SSRC (film still) (2022). 2K, color, and sound, 20 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Yalda Afsah, Eye to Eye (installation view) (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Yalda Afsah, Curro (film still) (2023). 2K, color, and sound, 30 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Yalda Afsah, Curro (film still) (2023). 2K, color, and sound, 30 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and JOAN.

Caroline Ellen Liou graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, USA; an MA in Contemporary Chinese Art and Geopolitics from the Courtauld Institute of Art, UK; and a degree in Curatorial Studies from the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Italy. She currently works as Curatorial Associate at ICA LA.

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