A Song of Tigris & Euphrates

With two new solo exhibitions and new productions especially created for this occasion by the artists Cemile Sahin and Andrzej Steinbach, the Kunsthalle Osnabrück opened the second part of its annual theme Romanticism. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic and a warin Ukraine, Kunsthalle Osnabrück sets out to explore the question: What’s the current state of our hopeand desire for love, identity and belonging? This year’s theme Romanticism uses the eponymous art and literature movement as a distorting mirror with which to examine the current state of society.Sweeping across Germany and Europe,hardly any othermovement has managed to shape such a strong collective feeling situated between departure, nostalgia and nationalism through aesthetic means. Set against the backdrop that is the museum’s medieval architecture, the Kunsthalle wants to investigate whether the current sense of global turmoil has inspired a comeback of the visual and linguistic worlds of Romanticism.The exhibition programme of the annual theme includes solo exhibitions by the Forum Democratic Culture and Contemporary Art,Anna Haifisch, Gabriella Hirst, Irène Mélix, Cemile Sahin,Andrzej Steinbach, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings. The focus of Cemile Sahin's artistic work is on political events and their narrative. In her installations, her multimedia approach combines the media of film, sculpture, text, sound and photography. Drawing on archive materials and true events, Sahin thus develops spatial constellations that re-question and contextualise political events and prioritize the manipulation of images and stories. States and militarism, land and landscape as propagating symbolism with actual political consequences are recurring themes. At the centre of her installation for Kunsthalle Osnabrück is the premiere of the first part of her film series VIER BALLADEN FÜR MEINEN VATER/FOUR BALLADS FOR MY FATHER. The short film, entitled Frühling/Spring, addresses and links the effects of the 1923 Lausanne Treaties, almost one hundred years later, with the natural resource of water and how it is used as a geopolitical instrument of power by authoritarian systems and states as a weapon of war. The film deals with demographic changes in the landscape and their severe consequences caused by the construction of huge dams, such as the Atatürk Dam in Northern Kurdistan. In the process, the story develops around the Kurdish family Bingöl, whose living conditions exemplarily stand as a symptom of historical and contemporary political decisions and their effects. The work A Song of Tigris & Euphrates by Cemile Sahin was produced with the support of Esther Schipper, Berlin Paris and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH. Cemile Sahin (*1990 in Wiesbaden) lives and works in Berlin. Most recently, Cemile Sahin's work has been shown in international solo and group exhibitions, including at the Lyon Biennale, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn (both 2022), the Akademie der Künste Berlin (2021), the Kunstverein Hamburg (2020), the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig and the NS Dokumentationszentrum München (both 2019). She published the novels TAXI (2019, Korbinian Verlag) and ALLE HUNDE STERBEN [ALL DOGS DIE] (2020, Aufbau Verlag), which are an important part of her artistic practice. She is an ars viva award winner for Visual Arts (2020) and a laureate of the Alfred Döblin Medal (2020).