Cemile Sahin, Visual Arts, 2019

*1990 Wiesbaden, lives in Berlin

Cemile Sahin is an artist. She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at Berlin University of the Arts. Her works move between film, photography, sculpture, sound and text. The starting points for her works are images or stories, which she re-stages in her multimedia installations. Through this, she questions the functionalisation of media and the meaning of different perspectives for historiography, and explores the question of how history and its telling changes if it is constructed through the narratives of different perspectives. Cemile Sahin is the winner of the ars viva Prize 2020 for visual arts.

Berlin Fellowship

“CENTER SHIFT #01: I start again”

Residency Project

CENTER SHIFT #01: I start again, 2019, Filmstill
CENTER SHIFT #01: I start again, 2019, Filmstill

CENTER SHIFT #01: I start again

2019, video installation

Cemile Sahin is building a walk-in setting using different kinds of billboards and screens for the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Monitors, seating, banners and carpet transform the exhibition space into a walk-in sculpture that is reminiscent of the aesthetics of the automotive industry on the one hand and of internet interfaces and computer game scenarios on the other. Narration, language, the simultaneity of accessible information and the deconstruction of these parts are used as tools and stylistic devices. The multi-part film Center Shift, devised as a series, is the centrepiece of the Berlin presentation. In the film or the five episodes, Sahin continues to pursue what she has already created in the collage-like spatial setting, namely to depict multiple perspectives so that the narration avoids being a single whole: A group of people meet seemingly at random with the intention of shooting a film. Because they believe they have no stories worth telling in their lives, a man is shot in the heat of the moment, which is to serve as the starting point for the story. In each episode, the murder is re-staged and retold from a different perspective by a different person. We do not see the murder, we just witness it being retold. With each episode, the stories told overlap until the viewer is finally faced with the following question: did this story actually happen or is it just the re-enactment of a story for which they are trying to find images, as the story had no image at the beginning of their narrative? (Julia Schäfer)

Cast: Pers Mastori, Regula Steiner-Tomic, Inga Busch, Alice Hauck, Lynn Takeo Musiol, Viktor Bone, Marten Korte, Yoko Lenertz, Asia Cali, Jenny Henneicke, Katja Bienert, Lara Sell, Nathaly Girlado, Cruz, Uwe Gerdel, Nele Friester, Stefan Keunecke, Theo Findeis, Donald Gardner, Christoph Thielke
Camera & Grading: Konstantin von Sichart; Production: Paul Niedermayer; Management: Niklas Binzberger; Light Designe: Caio Soares; Sound: Nicolas Keil; Sound Design: Tobias Gringel; Original Music: Nazanin Noori, Salem Rashid; Art Direction: Leon Kahne
Special thanks to Thomas Timmermanns, Rüdiger Maaß, Arendt Oetker, Jens Crull, Volksbühne Berllin, Julia Schäfer, Nam Nguyen, Sascha Ehlert, Dennis
Buck, Maria Ahmed, Dilan Sahin, Nils Fischer, Herr Schulz and Herr Sonntag.

Where The Story Unfolds, work presentations JUNGE AKADEMIE 2020

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