BERLIN.- The Kurdish-Alevi writer and artist Cemile Sahin has been awarded the Erich Fried Prize 2025. This was decided by the German writer and journalist Fatma Aydemir, the sole juror for 2025. She writes about the author:
“Cemile Sahin is a writer and visual artist whose literary work is shaped by the masterful intertwining of language and image, of the poetic and the political. In her novels, she relates in a sober and equally tender manner the stories of people who, in a world marked by war and violence, fight not only for their mere survival, but always also for their own concept of freedom. The perspective that Sahin employs is that of a cineaste, a language artist, and a chronicler of exile.”
The Erich Fried Prize has been awarded by the International Erich Fried Society since 1990 and is decided by a panel of judges that changes each year. It is endowed with €15,000 and is sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media, and Sport.
Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1990. She studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.
Cemile Sahin's artistic practice operates between film, photography, sculpture, and literature. Freely deploying different media, without privileging one or the other, her work embodies today's synchronicity of image- and text-based communications. Integrating images into her books and text in her imageworld, Sahin moves with extraordinary agility between words and pictures, between still and moving image, between text as form, sign, and symbol. Deliberately elliptical and fragmentary, her work's narrative strategies draw on an episodic format of narration established by contemporary TV series and internet videos. In her practice, Sahin acknowledges the subjectiveness and codedness of all storytelling, and its instrumentalization by the media. Her works find a giddy rhythm in the knowing use of the dynamics of these processes, sweeping away her spectators to unexpected, and sometimes uncomfortable realizations, among them that the writing of history is, and always has been, determined by constantly shifting perspectives.
Texts and narratives are an integral part of her artistic practice. In parallel, and in conversation, to her exhibitions she has published three novels: her debut in 2019, TAXI followed by ALLE HUNDE STERBEN (ALL DOGS DIE) in 2020, and most recently KOMMANDO AJAX. For TAXI Sahin was awarded the Alfred Döblin-Medaille. For KOMMANDO AJAX she was selected for the Vienna Literature Prize and shortlisted for the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair.
In 2019 she was awarded the ars viva 2020 prize for Visual Arts. The same year she was a fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. In 2021 Sahin received the AArtist in Residence-Stipend, awarded by the German Foreign Ministry in cooperation with the LVBG, the Association of Berlin Galleries. In 2023, she received the London-based CIRCA Prize (2023).
The artist's exhibitions and projects include: BB - BORN TO BLOOM, Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (2025); Cemile Sahin. ROAD RUNNER, Fondazione ICA Milano (2025); Cemile Sahin. ROAD RUNNER, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2025); Sieh Dir die Menschen an!, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, Chemnitz (2024); white sea olive groves, Malta Art Biennale, Valletta (2024); Sieh dir die Menschen an!, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2023); Gewehr im Schrank - Rifle in the closet, Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden (2023); A Song of Tigris and Euphrates, Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2022); manifesto of fragility: 16th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2022); Identität nicht nachgewiesen, Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn (2022); Arbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2021); ars viva 2020, Kunstverein, Hamburg (2020); Where the Story Unfolds, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2020); ars viva 2020, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2019) and Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, NS-Dokumentationszentrum, Munich (2019).
Her works are included in the collections of Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Kunsthaus Zürich; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin/Düsseldorf; Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Servais Family Collection, Brussels; and Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (The Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Germany).
