Cemile Sahin is an artist, filmmaker, and writer who handles aesthetic as well as linguistic codes with stunning confidence and virtuosic skill. Born to Kurdish Alevi parents in Wiesbaden, Germany, she considers the imagery and cultural conventions of European culture with an analytic eye and a dose of sarcasm. Her take on them is not just refreshing in its Pop colors, it is above all tartly challenging. THE SHARPEST BLADE IS THE ONE YOU NEVER SEE COMING, it says on the collage the gallery used to advertise the show: A hand with meticulously polished purple fingernails holds a golden knife before a paradisiacal blue sky.
The central work in the exhibition, however, was the film ROAD RUNNER (all works 2025). Projected on a large screen set diagonally across a corner of the gallery covered by stridently yellow carpeting, it was a dystopian ballad set alternately in a real world staged with analog technology and human actors and a parallel virtual reality where the protagonist’s sister has been taken by kidnappers. To rescue her, our heroine needs to do a lot of running and totals a car; some chow mein is wolfed down, and there are fistfights and shootouts, too. Fiction becomes reality, and reality becomes fictional; video games such as Grand Theft Auto and Counter-Strike mingle with TikTok videos to conjure a hybrid aesthetic blending movies, television, computer games, and social media. Hovering above it all are swarms of drones. They are the protagonists, because this is about surveillance and about power and, of course, about violence. But who holds the power? And who exerts violence? Despite posing such questions, Sahin’s film is neither critical on its face nor didactic in tone. On the contrary, its splashy visual design is breathtaking and spellbinding, delightful and cruel in equal measure. Fun and tragedy do not just coexist, this film tells us, they are sometimes even predicated on one another.
The film was flanked by sixteen aluminum-mounted ink-jet prints hanging in sets of four on the walls of the gallery. The quartets were framed by the phrase THE LANGUAGE OF POWER IS THE LANGUAGE OF PRECISION spelled in letters that were reminiscent—surely not by coincidence—of Lawrence Weiner’s painted statements. To realize the clinically chilly compositions, Sahin used artificial intelligence, which helped her translate her ideas, sourced from the world of advertising, video games, entertainment, and the legacy of Pop art, into visuals. The aforementioned hand holding a golden knife is one of them; another shows glossy bullets floating before a lipstick-red background. Sahin’s pictures are alluring and terrifying, banal and menacing, equivocal, contradictory, and, in a word, absurd. In fact, absurdity is perhaps their defining characteristic.
Sahin is also a writer, with three published novels under her belt. The most recent one, Kommando Ajax (2024), recounts in hard, lightning-fast sentences the story of the Rembrandts and Vermeers stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The paintings—this is where it gets fictional again—somehow end up in the hands of a Kurdish family in Rotterdam, whereupon murder and mayhem ensue. Woven into the fanciful plot are searching insights into the real world of Kurdish refugees in Europe, which earned Sahin’s novel a nomination for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Like her writing, Sahin’s films employ intense imagery and rapid-fire cuts to create a rhythm that casts an inexorable spell.
