Neu Cöln 2025

Esther Schipper is delighted to participate at Neu Cöln with works by Cemile Sahin.

Cemile Sahin’s participation at Neu Cöln includes the work Forever in your heart and a new series of wallmounted panels.

Forever in your heart (2025) belongs to a series relating to Sahin’s film ROAD RUNNER (2025), recently aquired by Museum Ludwig and currently on view at Art Cologne, presented by the Junger Ankauf initiative of the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst. A unique work, Forever in your heart’s motif––a red rose set against a light blue sky––was created by the artist with an AI image tool. Sahin first trained the AI on her body of work and then used verbal prompts to generate a specific picture. In effect employing AI to realize the image she imagined, Sahin fine-tuned the generated composition to match her characteristic in pop-cultural aesthetic. Printed on pearly-white photographic paper and mounted on aluminum, the panel displays the short sentence “Forever in your heart but never in your life.” Along the lines we discover a deliberately ambiguous subtext: the phrase can be read as ironic, profound or simply meme-like and nonsensical. Forever in your heart exemplifies Sahin’s extraordinary agility in moving between still and moving image, between text as form, sign, or symbol. Reflecting on a world of loudly competing stimuli, for this presentation, the work is installed above an eyecatching, all caps, and bright red vinyl wall text that reads “NOW WE WAIT FOR IT TO SPEAK.” Underscoring the synchronicity of image- and text-based communication in contemporary culture, Sahin fashioned such f lashy wall texts to spell out a signature feature of her exhibition design. 

A new series of panels, among them YOU MEASURE HEIGHT, YOU KNOW DEPTH and YOU KNOW DIFFERENCE (all 2025), features acrylic flowers encased in epoxy resin. Bright colors, artificiality, glossy surfaces, and sparkly motifs are stylistic elements that Sahin uses to address complex themes through a popcultural lens. With these panels, the artist plays with the aesthetics of oversized nail art and the stereotypical ideas which might consider flowers and extra-long gel nails devalued attributes of femininity. Flowers and their cultural associations have also been a topic addressed in Sahin’s film installation BB — Born to Bloom (2025), produced for her recent solo exhibition at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. The video work juxtaposes the metaphorical quality of two flowers: on the one hand, Gula Xemgîn, translating to “sad flower,” represents the Kurdish myth that one can only be truly free in the mountains. And on the other, the Geranium, adorning balconies and gardens throughout Switzerland, where the flowers are such a familiar feature of the Swiss landscape that their red color was incorporated into the TAZ 83 camouflage suit.

The presented works, or, more to the point, their relation to Sahin’s ambitious film projects, are representative of her artistic practice’s situatedness in-between film, photography, sculpture, and literature. Deliberately elliptical and fragmentary, her work’s narrative strategies draw on an episodic format of narration established by contemporary TV series and internet videos. Sahin’s work speaks about family and loss, as well as about the technologies facilitating digital disembodiment and political oppression. She not only comments on these defining technologies, such as drones and AI, but uses them as tools in her cutting-edge artistic process. 

If you wish to receive further information about our presentation at Neu Cöln, please contact Jonas Kriszeleit kriszeleit [at] estherschipper.com

Neu Cöln
Stoff Pavillon Möller
Hahnenstraße 8, 50667 Cologne
November 5 – November 9 2025
neucoeln.com