Introduction

At the 16th Lyon Biennale, titled manifesto of fragility, Cemile Sahin presents Drone Valley, 2022, a new video installation.

Sahin's new multimedia installation focuses on her ongoing work concerning the treaty of Lausanne and its impact on the Middle East one hundred years later. The artist focuses on the third longest wall in the world: the 900km long wall that Turkey built on its border with Syria, supposedly to protect itself against illegal crossing and smuggling. An inflatable sculpture of one part of the wall is shown next to a video of the M4 motorway, a strategic route partly running along the wall, through which Turkey plans to fortify its borders. A century after the Lausanne contracts, a new connection ties the Swiss city, known as "drone valley", to the Middle East: drones and drone software manufactured in Lausanne have been linked to Turkey's patrol system of these vast walls and roads. Connecting aerial, video, sound and sculptural materials from these two massive infrastructure projects, Sahin emphasizes the imposition of ideological realities onto landscapes, as well as the purposeful erasure these ideologies perpetrate. 

Spanning film, photography, sculpture and literature, Sahin's work reveals how concepts of state power manifest themselves through economic and geopolitical tensions across national borders. 

The 16th Lyon Biennale, entitled manifesto of fragility, positions fragility at the heart of a generative form of resistance that is emboldened by the past, responsive to the present and primed for the future. In acknowledging fragility as one of few universally felt truths in our divided world, the Biennale assembles a host of creative practices and objects spanning two millennia that variously speak to the vulnerabilities of people and places, past and present, near and far. Conceived as a collective statement authored through word, image, sound and movement by 200 artists and creatives, it calls on a community of resilient voices to draft a manifesto for a world that is blamelessly fragile. The Biennale is structured around three distinct yet inter-connected layers, where fragility and resistance are explored through the lens of the individual, the city, and the world respectively: The many lives and deaths of Louise Brunet, Beirut and the Golden Sixties and A world of endless promise.

Sahin's Drone Valley, 2022 will be on view as part of A world of endless promise, Fagor factories, 65 Rue Challemel Lacour, 69007 Lyon.