CEMILE SAHIN

The exhibition is part of Gallery Weekend *Discoveries.

The work’s title, It Would Have Taught Me Wisdom, is taken from a quote attributed to Prussian king Wilhelm II’s about the coveted Minerva sculpture, which was the starting point of Sahin’s non-linear research into the treaty of Sèvres. It was the last of the treaties reordering nations, redrawing borders, and redistributing territories after World War I. The Ottoman Empire was forced to give up 80% of its prewar territory, and although it was never ratified, the harsh conditions of the contract continue to echo as a traumatic event in Turkish politics, instrumentalised in nationalist rhetoric to this day to symbolise an external threat to the integrity of the Turkish state. Sahin is currently developing a series of films about both treaties, and their lasting repercussions for the region.

Cemile Sahin’s artistic practice operates between film, photography, sculpture, and literature. Freely deploying different media, without privileging one or the other, her work embodies today’s synchronicity of image- and text-based communications. Integrating images into her books and text in her image-world, Sahin moves with extraordinary agility between words and pictures, between still and moving image, between text as form, sign, and symbol. Deliberately elliptical and fragmentary, her work’s narrative strategies draw on an episodic format of narration established by contemporary TV series and internet videos. In her practice, Sahin acknowledges the subjectiveness and codedness of all storytelling, and its instrumentalisation by the media. Her works find a giddy rhythm in the knowing use of the dynamics of these processes, sweeping away her spectators to unexpected, and sometimes uncomfortable realisations, among them that the writing of history is, and always has been, determined by constantly shifting perspectives.

Sahin’s debut novel TAXI was published in 2019, followed by her book ALLE HUNDE STERBEN in 2020, both of which are integral parts of her artistic practice. For TAXI Sahin was awarded the Alfred Döblin-Medaille. In 2019 she was awarded the ars viva 2020 prize for Visual Arts. The same year she was a fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. In 2021 Sahin received the AArtist in Residence-Stipend, awarded by the German Foreign Ministry in cooperation with the LVBG, the Association of Berlin Galleries.