Cemile Sahin

Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1990. She studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.

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 instrumentalization 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 realizations, among them that the writing of history is, and always has been, determined by constantly shifting perspectives.

Her 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. In 2023, the artist will have a major solo presentation at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, entitled Sieh dir die Menschen an! featuring a new, site-specific installation.  

The artist's exhibitions and projects include: Sieh Dir die Menschen an!, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, Chemnitz (2024); white sea olive groves, Malta Art Biennale, Valletta (2024); Sieh dir die Menschen an!, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023); Gewehr im Schrank - Rifle in the closet, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2023); A Song of Tigris and Euphrates, Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022); Manifesto of Fragility : Biennale de Lyon 2022, Lyon Biennial, Lyon (2022); A Song of Tigris & Euphrates, Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück (2022); Identität nicht nachgewiesen, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2022); Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2021); Laboratory of Contested Space / Art & Truthtelling, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2020); ars viva 2020, Kunstverein, Hamburg (2020); Where the Story Unfolds, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2020); Studio Berlin, Berghain, Berlin (2020); ars viva 2020, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2019); Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Munich (2019); Kurdisches Filmfestival, Babylon Cinema, Berlin (2019), and Die Kant, Uferstudios, Berlin (2017).