FF - Live at the Fridericianum

SCREENING with CEMILE SAHIN: FOUR BALLADS FOR MY FATHER – SPRING

Thursday, Oct 19, 2023, 7 pm – 8 pm

Four Ballads for my Father – Spring (2022) is the first part of a filmic narrative that concerns itself with the social, economic, and political impact of the Southeast Anatolia Project (Turkish: Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, GAP). The film follows the history of a fictitious Kurdish family whose home in North Kurdistan disappeared under water in the wake of the construction of the Atatürk Dam. This forced the members of the family to leave, scattering them between Istanbul and exile in Paris, France.

Cemile Sahin’s artistic practice is characterized by the interaction of word and image, and embraces film, photography, sculpture, sound, and installations, just as it does literature. By means of quotes and allusions to various genres she explores topics such as surveillance, (state) violence, the instrumentalization of the media, as well as the significance of different perspectives for the writing of history.

Cemile Sahin (born 1990 in Wiesbaden, lives and works in Berlin) studied Fine Art at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her works have already been on show in solo exhibitions, such as Gewehr im Schrank at Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden (2023) and A Song of Tigris & Euphrates in Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022). Moreover, she has participated in countless group shows, such as the Biennale de Lyon (2022), at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn (2022), in the Berlin Academy of Arts (2021), Kunstverein Hamburg (2020) and Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Leipzig (2019). Her first novel Taxi was published in 2019 by Korbinian Verlag, followed in 2020 by Alle Hunde sterben, which was published by Aufbau Verlag.