Admission free

Cemile Sahin, „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“, 2017 | Courtesy the artist

Cemile Sahin

The artwork „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei” (“i think reporter cemile sahin has not been to turkey for a long time”) by Cemile Sahin was part of the exhibition Tell me about yesterday tomorrow (Nov. 28, 2019 until Oct. 18, 2020).

About the artist

In her art practice, Cemile Sahin (born in Wiesbaden in 1990) focuses on the interaction between words and images. Her films, photographs, sculptures, sound and text pieces frequently start out with narratives and found images, which she reinterprets in her works. Fundamental questions regard the instrumentalization of media and the meaning of various perspectives for the writing of history. Sahin writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines. Her debut novel, TAXI, was published by Korbinian Verlag, Berlin, in 2019.

“ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei” (“i think reporter cemile sahin has not been to turkey for a long time”), 2017

Video, 6:24 min

Cemile Sahin’s video was created following an article the artist wrote for ZEIT Online in which she considers the experiences of the Kurdish people, whose history and language have been deliberately suppressed time and again right up to the present day. In the early 1990s, Sahin’s parents, like many Kurds, fled the ongoing government repression taking place in eastern Turkey, seeking refuge in Europe. But even outside Turkey, Kurdish is suppressed in many ways. For those in exile in Europe, Turkish becomes a kind of substitute language, once again suppressing Kurdish identity. The history of one’s own origins is juxtaposed against speechlessness, and there is often also a lack of images and documents that can attest to this history. When Sahin published her article, she received many comments in response, which tried to deny her own experiences relating to the history of her identity. In the video, the artist reads her text aloud and then scrolls through the comments and links that were sent to her, most of them negative responses. Her work raises the provocative question of whether history today is being written in part in the comments sections of online media.

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Installation „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“ by Cemile Sahin in the exhibition Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, 2019 | © NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, photo: Connolly Weber Photography

Cemile Sahin, „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“, 2017 | Courtesy the artist

Cemile Sahin, „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“, 2017 | Courtesy the artist

Cemile Sahin, „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“, 2017 | Courtesy the artist

Cemile Sahin, „ich glaube reporterin cemile sahin war lange nicht mehr in der türkei“, 2017 | Courtesy the artist

Veranstaltung mit Cemile Sahin

Reading

Cemile Sahin: TAXI

Am 17. Februar 2020 war die Autorin und Künstlerin Cemile Sahin zu Gast im NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, um aus ihrem Roman TAXI zu lesen und mit Juliane Bischoff über ihre Arbeit zu sprechen.

To view this video, we require your consent for „YouTube".