The first 1 Day Projects organised by KIN presented Cemile Sahin’s film Spring, the first of her multi-part project Four Ballads for my Father, at Cinema Galerie on Thursday 1st of June at 8pm. The screening was introduced by Nicolaus Schafhausen and followed by a talk with the artist.
A major motif of Four Ballads for my Father is the role of water, in particular the economic and political effects of the GAP dam project in Turkey. For several decades, the Southeastern Anatolia Project, also known as GAP (Turkish: Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi), has been under construction on the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. For the neighboring countries, Syria and Iraq, the GAP project has become a serious threat and has repeatedly led to cross-borders tensions.
Sahin’s Spring addresses this topic through a fictional lens, telling the story of a Kurdish family whose homeland was flooded by the Turkish water dam project and its members displaced and on the road, between Istanbul and Paris.
Kurdish, Turkish and French, with English subtitles.
Duration: 43:40 min
Cemile Sahin, born 1990 in Wiesbaden, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin. Her latest exhibitions include Rifle in the closet, at Nassauirscher Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany, in 2023, A Song of Tigris & Euphrates, at Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany, in 2022 and It Would Have Taught Me Wisdom, at Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany in 2021 as well as Biennale de Lyon 2022, France Manifesto of Fragility. She was awarded with the Alfred Döblin-Medaille for the novel TAXI, and the ars viva Prize, both in 2020.