Cemile Sahin Wins CIRCA Prize 2023

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The £30,000 (US $36,000) prize was awarded to Cemile Sahin for her video work Four Ballads for My Father - Spring (2023). The theme of this year’s CIRCA Prize was outlined in the CIRCA 20:23 Manifesto, Hope: The Art of Reading What Is Not Yet Written.

Sahin’s 2.5 minute film tells the story of a Kurdish family divided between Paris and Istanbul and the impact on their lives of the Southeastern Anatolia Dam Project which disrupted communities in Turkey’s Kurdish regions.

In the context of independent Kurdish Cinema muted by conflict in the region and Turkish cultural hegemony, ‘Making a film means hope’ Sahin explained.

‘Above all, it is “hope” that tells the stories in a language that belongs to 40 million people although the Kurdish language was forbidden in Turkey,’ she said.

Shirin Neshat who was one of the jurors that selected the prize-winner said, ‘the reason i was very drawn to her work was for the diversity of work that she does.’

Shirin Neshat b. 1957, Iran Follow +

Sahin has worked across various media including film, photography, sculpture and text in fragmentary episodic narrative-driven projects. Her first novels Taxi (2019) and Alle Hunde Sterben (All Dogs Die) (2020), are key new components of her practice which tackles perspective, popular media, narrative and experience, particularly in relation to conflict.

In Spring the artist weaves together the narrative from found footage in Kurdish television archives and family records, layering fiction and real-world sources.

Sahin hopes to use the prize money to create a new cinematic chapter of Spring in collaboration with an orchestra and women’s choir.Spring was publicly screened at London’s Piccadilly Lights, and in Berlin and Milan on 4 September, as part of the daily 8:23pm screening of 30 shortlisted submissions throughout September.

Other artists on the shortlist include: metaverse trio Keiken; Australian artist Tony Albert, whose submission addressed cultural misinterpretations of Aboriginal people; and duo Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen whose submitted film extract suppositioned the intergalactic origins of the Octopus.

The winners of the £10,000 public vote prize, awarded on the same night, were digital media and design duo JJ Agcaoili & Xin Wen for their 3D artwork EMERGE:NCY (2023) which presents, a giant voiceless unnamed woman struggling to break out from an enclosed space above the street.

‘The intense, massive visualisation of a giant human trying to break free from a box compels viewers to witness hope in raw action,’ the duo described.

The pair added that the work insists ‘that there is always something beyond the boxes that trap us.’ —[O]

Main image: Cemile Sahin with Michele Lamy, and Ai Wei Wei-designed CIRCA 2023 award. Courtesy CIRCA. Photo: Hoda Davaine / Dave Benett.