BB – BORN TO BLOOM, KUNST HALLE SANKT GALLEN, 2025
BB – BORN TO BLOOM is Sahin’ s first solo exhibition in Switzerland. It continues her exploration of the intersection between war and nature – a theme she has examined in several previous works and exhibitions. Sahin investigates how nature becomes not only a site of armed conflict but also a tool of military strategy: landscapes become barriers, natural resources become causes for war, forests become camouflage. Importantly, nature also carries collective identity, making it a target of psychological warfare. These overlaps between war, nature, and technology form geopolitical entanglements, which Sahin brings into focus.
The exhibition centres around a four-channel video installation that brings together two topographies: Switzerland and Kurdistan. Both landscapes are defined by striking mountain views that hold great symbolic meaning. The LED wall in front of the entrance sports Switzerland: the Matterhorn, snow-covered mountain passes, hiking maps. Alongside Rolex and ski lifts, the Swiss mountains serve as postcard motifs for ‹ Swissness ›, promoting fairness, precision, safety, political stability and pristineness. The LED-wall facing the windows features Kurdistan: the country that is not allowed to exist, whose displaced people live militantly in the mountains, poised between weapons and resistance. Cemile Sahin knows about the power of images: they perpetuate cultural clichés through their constant repetition in the media. On the LED screens, Sahin bombards us with bold, poster-like motifs until they flip: the romanticised Swiss Alps are revealed as a military dispositif, riddled with bunker structures and serving as an arena for tank exercises; on the other side, the Kurdish mountain ranges emerge as a homeland that sustains life as well as cultural heritage, and embodies long-awaited freedom.
Both landscapes, as different as their symbolic value may be, are politically linked. On 24 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne was signed at the Château d’ Ouchy. The treaty established the borders of modern-day Turkey, thereby undermining the territorial sovereignty of the Kurdish people. To this day, the geopolitical power relations established at that time continue to shape the Kurdish mountain regions, the Zagros, Qendîl and Cudî mountains. Meanwhile, Lausanne has become a world-leading development site for drones, which, as weapon systems, are an essential component of the wars in the Middle East.
Once again, the conjunction of technology, war, and nature examined by Sahin produces powerful images. For her arresting video montage, she spent weeks gathering footage from across the internet: social media posts, cell phone videos taken by her cousins, luxury brand advertisements, videos from the Swiss Army’ s YouTube channel, Kurdish archive material, comics, promotional films by armasuisse, video games. In her radical use of imagery, Sahin shows that « media are never innocent; they are accessories to all sorts of violence »( Mitchell Akiyama). Images shape our collective memory; they are politically constructed and used in the contexts of war. The oppression of a people often goes hand in hand with the erasure of their visual culture – for example, traditional Kurdish clothing, which repeatedly flashes up on the Kurdish side of Sahin’ s montage, has been banned in Turkey. At the same time, images, especially in combination with text, have a powerful pull on us. Social media exploit this effect through their algorithms, a logic that Cemile Sahin references in both the soundtrack and the fast-paced editing.
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