Introduction

The Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is  dedicating her first solo  exhibition in Switzerland to the  artist Cemile Sahin (*1990 in  Wiesbaden/DE, lives in Berlin/DE).  Cemile Sahin is a storyteller  working across a range of media,  including film, photography,  literature, and installation. Her  practice critically engages with  issues of power structures, war,  and violence. In her spatialised  narrations, Sahin explores how  media, politics, and warfare shape our understanding of history.  

For the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, the artist has developed new  spatial compositions that further her investigation into the  intersection of nature and war. Sahin is interested in how nature  becomes not only a field of armed conflict, but also a tool of  military strategy – as a barrier, camouflage, resource, or a site  of collective identity. The central work in the exhibition «BB –  BORN TO BLOOM», a multi-channel video installation, brings  together Kurdish and Swiss landscapes. Both topographies are  defined by striking mountain panoramas that carry symbolic  meaning. On one side are the Swiss Alps, which serve as a postcard  motif for the idea of ‹Swissness› promoted by tourism and, with  their bunker réduit, also represented a central defence mechanism  of the Swiss army. On the other side are the remote Kurdish  mountain regions – an embodiment of the Kurdish resistance  struggle and a symbol of long-awaited freedom. Both landscapes are  politically connected: in 1923, the ‹Treaty of Lausanne› defined  Turkey’s borders and undermined the territorial sovereignty of the  Kurdish people. In her video work Gewehr im Schrank/Rifle in the  closet (2023), Sahin explores how Lausanne has today become a key  development site for military combat drones – and how romanticised  Switzerland is, in fact, one of the most heavily armed countries  in the world.  

In «BB – BORN TO BLOOM», two flowers come to symbolise these  ambiguities: the geranium, which adorns balconies and gardens  throughout the country as the «Swiss national flower», and the  Gula Xemgîn (English: Kaiser’s crown, or kurdish tulip), the  «flower of freedom», which, in Kurdish folklore, blooms only at  high altitudes because that is the only place where it can truly  be free. In this way, Sahin creates a fragile metaphor for the  intersection of landscape and violence.  Sahin approaches complex themes through a pop-cultural aesthetic,  combining fast-paced found-footage videos with pop slogans on  large-format advertising media and fake flowers in epoxy resin.  Her use of color, materials, and language references the logic of  social media, creating immersive installations that draw us in  through a flood of text and images. Literature is just as much a  part of Sahin’s artistic practice as video and installation. She  has received several awards for her three novels – «TAXI» (2019),  «ALLE HUNDE STERBEN» (2020), and «KOMMANDO AJAX» (2024) – most  recently the Erich Fried Prize 2025 in Austria, as well as a  nomination for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2025.