Cemile Sahin

In films, images, lecture performances, and texts, artist and writer Cemile Sahin explores the unreliability of history as a narrative format. Themes and content from Sahin’s bold text and visual output crossover between novels and installations that closely examine historical or fictional scenes of conflict resolution. Sahin dissects details through dramatic, multiperspective storytelling, partly in homage to serial television programs. Whether in examinations of a party of potential murder suspects or a meeting of European leaders deciding the fate of the Ottoman Empire, Sahin’s works show how concepts of truth change based on competing portrayals of history, the viewpoints of its narrators, and the accounts that survive to be heard. (Recipient of both the ars viva Prize, Germany and the Alfred Döblin-Medaille, Germany in 2020)