Cemile Sahin – Drone Valley, 2022

Spanning film, photography, sculpture and literature, Cemile Sahin’s work reveals how concepts of state power manifest themselves through economic and geopolitical tensions across national borders. Her new multimedia installation focuses on her ongoing work concerning the treaty of Lausanne and its impact on the Middle East a hundred years later. Sahin focuses on the third longest wall in the world: the 900km long wall that Turkey built on its border with Syria, supposedly to protect itself against illegal crossing and smuggling. An inflatable sculpture of one part of the wall is shown next to a video of the M4 motorway, a strategic route partly running along the wall, through which Turkey plans to fortify its borders. A century after the Lausanne contracts, a new connection ties the Swiss city, known as “drone valley”, to the Middle East: drones and drone softwares manufactured in Lausanne have been linked to Turkey’s patrol system of these vast walls and roads. Connecting aerial, video, sound and sculptural materials from these two massive infrastructure projects, Sahin emphasizes the imposition of ideological realities onto landscapes, as well as the purposeful erasure these ideologies perpetrate.