Cemile Sahin‘s artistic practice moves between film, photography, installation and
literature. Thematically, the artist and author deals with unnoticed narratives about
wars, militarization, surveillance and control. Stories and histories from the past and
the present often merge in her works in ways that shed new light on contemporary
relations between warfare and life. Sahin‘s multimedia installations are rooted in a
conceptual working practice. By combining image and text material from different
sources, including literary quotations, online videos and 3D animations, her works
embody the simultaneity of image- and text-based communication. Her works
intentionally create a dizzying rhythm: they sweep the viewer along, towards
unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable insights into historiography and warfare.
For the Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Cemile Sahin is developing a spatial
installation entitled Gewehr im Schrank - Rifle in the closet, in which she
addresses the historical development of Western societies’ militarization, with
Switzerland as a case study. The title refers to the standard practice of Swiss soldiers
taking home their service weapons after military training and storing it in the closet
for emergencies. As a result, Switzerland is the country with the highest density of
privately stored weapons in Europe. The installation consists of a video combined
with floor and wall collages, interweaving different historical, political, technical
and digital aspects of militarization. The starting point of Sahin‘s research were two
treaties signed a hundred years ago, which divided up the territories of the Ottoman
Empire after World War I: the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) and the Treaty of Lausanne (1923),
in which, among other things, the current national borders of Turkey were defined.
In 2023, as the Treaty of Lausanne celebrates its centenary, the consequences of
this arbitrary border demarcation are still felt in the region today. Sahin focuses on
Lausanne, the capital of the Canton of Vaud, as the negotiating site of historic armistice
agreements and peace treaties on the one hand and simultaneously the most
important location for the production of combat drones today.
Cemile Sahin (*1990, Wiesbaden) studied fine arts at Central Saint Martins College of
Art and Design in London and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. This is the first
time a project of hers will be shown in the RheinMain area. She has been featured in
numerous international solo and group exhibitions, including the Lyon Biennale, the
Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Kunsthalle Osnabrück (all 2022), the Akademie der
Künste Berlin (2021), the Kunstverein Hamburg (2020), the Galerie für Zeitgenössische
Kunst Leipzig and the NS Dokumentationszentrum München (both 2019). She
published the novels TAXI (2019, Korbinian Verlag) and ALLE HUNDE STERBEN (2020,
Aufbau Verlag). Sahin was a fellow of the Junge Akademie der Künste in Berlin (2019), is
an arsviva award winner for visual arts (2020) and a laureate of the Alfred Döblin Medal
(2020). Cemile Sahin is represented by Esther Schipper Berlin/ Paris/ Seoul.