CEMILE SAHIN

ROAD RUNNER transforms the exhibition space into a vivid environment that employs the colourful, staggering visual language of pop culture and video games to address contemporary political topics, among them the use of drones by corporations, authoritarian regimes, and the military. On view will be a film, sixteen unique aluminium panels, and six custom-made punching bags. Reflecting on a world of loudly competing stimuli, the new works are presented within an eye-catching exhibition design, with multi-coloured text passages and a yellow carpet.

Sahin’s work speaks about family and loss, as well as about the technologies facilitating digital disembodiment and political oppression. She not only comments on these defining technologies, such as drones and AI, but uses them as tools in her cutting-edge artistic process.

The film, also entitled ROAD RUNNER, employs a fast mix of genres: cinematic storytelling alternates with drone footage, faux commercials, animations and video games. ROAD RUNNER imagines a dystopian future in which killer drones have seized control and established a brutal order. It tells the story of Bêrîtan, who struggles to free her sister from digital captivity in a parallel Virtual Reality. Inspired by the ubiquity of games such as GTA (Grand Theft Auto) or Counter Strike, ROAD RUNNER is a mash-up of narrative strategies from film, TV, video games and social media platforms. It’s hybrid aesthetics draw on the quick, direct communication of TikTok videos as well as on the tough, militaristic do-or-die storytelling of gaming culture.

The film’s narrative fictionalises a major theme in Sahin’s work: drones as concrete instruments of surveillance and military intervention. With it, she continues to explore the connection between video games, military training, authoritarian regimes, and arms trade, and takes drones as a larger symbol of the entanglement of entertainment, corporate and authoritarian powers. Thus, drones and the impact of weapons are important recurring themes explored for example in her work Gewehr im Schrank (Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden, 2023), and Drone Valley (Biennale in Lyon, 2022).

A group of sixteen large-scale wall-mounted aluminium panels feature bright, flashy motifs created using AI. Each panel is unique. The works were created by Sahin with a machine-learning image tool: first training it on her own work, Sahin used verbal prompts to generate specific pictures, and then fine-tune them, in effect employing AI as a tool for realizing images she had imagined. Printed on pearly-white photographic paper and mounted on aluminium, the panels combine the images with short texts that introduce a deliberately ambiguous subtext: the phrases can be read as ironic, profound or sometimes simply meme-like and nonsensical.

The images have an exaggerated cuteness, the kind of aesthetic deemed most successful by algorithms (and behaviourists): balloon letters, pretty flowers, cute (or scary) dogs, fancy cars, stylish women, lustrous fingernails, but also guns and knives. With their brilliant colour and brash subject matter, the panels put into playful form serious topics: what are we to make, say, of glossy bullets floating on a lipstick-red background or a golden knife held by a hand with long pink nails? The visual pleasure masks a certain horror, not least at its near-irresistible seductiveness. Yet there is no cynicism or judgement in Sahin’s works: This is how it is, the artist seems to suggest, fun and tragedy coexist.

A number of hanging punching bags are printed with motifs related to the film ROAD RUNNER. In the film, Bêrîtan trains with a boxing community that helps her gain the strength to rescue her sister. The bags function as an extension of the film’s narrative into the exhibition space, the virtual spilling over into the real.

Cemile Sahin’s new film ROAD RUNNER is presented in collaboration with CIRCA and funded by #CIRCAECONOMY, a circular model supporting the free public programme and the annual CIRCA PRIZE, of which Cemile Sahin was a recipient in 2023. Since launching in October 2020, CIRCA has re-distributed over £1,000,000 of #CIRCAECONOMY funds in public art commissions, cash grants, scholarships, and charitable donations, supporting the creative ecosystem and empowering artists globally.