Habibi goes Werkraum x Cemile Sahin

The Habibi Kiosk team presents works by award-winning artist, author and filmmaker Cemile Sahin in the Werkraum of the Kammerspiele: For the first time, Sahin’s novel “ALLE HUNDE STERBEN” can be experienced in a staged reading. We will also be showing the Munich premiere of her feature film “BIHAR” (Kurdish: Spring; 2022, 43 min.). This will be followed by an artist talk, moderated by Fatima Khan.

Cemile Sahin’s artistic practice operates between film, photography, sculpture. Language and image are inseparable in her work. She takes a particular interest in how history is written and how images and media are used to instrumentalize and manipulate. Her work’s narrative strategies draw on an episodic format of narration, sweeping away her spectators to unexpected realizations. In her practice, she also deals extensively with forms and representations of (state) violence, not at least in her novels “TAXI” (2019) and “ALLE HUNDE STERBEN” (EN: ALL DOGS DIE, 2020).

In ALLE HUNDE STERBEN Cemile Sahin tells the story of nine people in nine episodes who find their exile in a high-rise building in western Turkey. They have all experienced torture, violence and abduction by units of the Turkish army and police. Among them: A mother who loads her dead son onto a pick-up truck. A woman chained up in a dog kennel. As they tell of their escape, the systematic terror of the Turkish military catches up with them again.

BIHAR (kurdish: Spring) is the first of Cemile Sahins multi-part project “Four Ballads for my Father”. A major motif is the role of water, in particular the economic and political effects of the GAP dam project in Turkey on the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. For the neighboring countries of Syria and Iraq, the GAP project has become a serious threat and has repeatedly led to tensions between the countries. The film addresses the topic through a fictional lens, telling the story of the Kurdish family whose homeland was flooded by a Turkish water dam project and and whose members are scattered between Istanbul, Paris and in transit. In one vignette after the other we meet members of the family and learn about their lives, all of whom are connected by their relationship to their missing husband, friend and father Hassan.

The narrative draws on various genres, including documentary, political thriller, film noir, melodrama and telenovela, which lends the film a relevant humor despite its examination of structural violence. As is so often the case in Sahin’s works, fact and fiction cannot always be distinguished from one another.

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still), Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

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Sima Dehgani

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Sima Dehgani

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still) Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Par,

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still), Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

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Sima Dehgani

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Sima Dehgani

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still), Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still), Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

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Sima Dehgani

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Cemile Sahin, Four Ballads for my Father – Spring, 2022 (Film still), Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul

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Sima Dehgani

Cemile Sahin

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Paul Niedermayer

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Sima Dehgani

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