Artist Cemile Sahin’s new single-channel video work, ROAD RUNNER (2025), opens with a shot straight out of a made-for-TV action thriller. In an unspecified warzone in the Middle East, a screen simulating some sort of communication panel notifies the agent, or player, of their potentially deadly, inescapable mission—to meet with an underground contact to obtain a certain substance. The screen then spells out the punishing conditions under which the mission is to be carried out: the quest takes place in a crowded suburban area, the friendly-fire setting is “on” and killer drones have been deployed. The level of difficulty is “medium”.

Installed inside the main space at Berlin’s Esther Schipper gallery, the 15-minute video plays in a loop on a large screen, which is set at an angle to project into the room. Neon-yellow carpeted flooring cuts diagonally across the space, replicating the screen’s angle, while its fluorescent, toxic hue reflects off the neon-lined ceiling into the brightly lit space. The walls are emblazoned with the sentence ‘THE LANGUAGE OF POWER IS THE LANGUAGE OF PRECISION’, repeated on each wall in a style of typography slightly reminiscent of American conceptualist Lawrence Weiner’s iconic text works. To complete the visual onslaught, sixteen large-scale aluminium panels feature flashy motifs that oscillate from menacing to cute: there are, for example, two pitbulls revealing sharp canines, shiny knives, or a bubble-gum pink Bentley—all of which are images that also appear in the film. These visuals are created using AI trained with the artist’s own artwork and using prompts that play on the cultural stereotypes often attached to the Kurdish minority to which Sahin, who was born in Germany, also belongs.

Sahin’s rise in Germany can be described as meteoric. The artist, who also has three novels and a short film under her belt, is now holding her second exhibition — titled ROAD RUNNER after the video work at its centre – in one of Berlin’s most prestigious galleries. And Sahin is on the cusp of gaining recognition on the international stage, too. Her second novel, All Dogs Die, has just been translated into English and she is currently working on a cinema adaptation of her third. As this exhibition closes in early March, the video work ROAD RUNNER will travel from Berlin to ICA Milano, where it will go on view during the city’s buzzy design week. Sahin sees all of her output as interconnected. “To make films you need to have a certain degree of working with language, too. Image and text go together. It has never been separated for me, and all of my books are written like films,” she tells STIR. Moving across these disciplines, she maintains a perspective that highlights the oppression and precarity of the Kurdish population of Turkey and the fight for Kurdish self-determination in the region.

No one could have anticipated the fall of Syria’s Assad regime at the time of making ROAD RUNNER, but as reality unfolded, the Kurdish men and women fighters of Rojava (in north and east Syria), who have been successfully fending off ISIS militants for years, albeit with tremendous losses and great sacrifices, are now facing an even more uncertain future. The video work is set in a not-so-distant but brutal future, in which killer drones scan the earth to eliminate dissidents. The storyline follows the young Bêrîtan, a female fighter who’s trying to reach her sister. In the film’s pop-culture infused mash-up of storytelling techniques, which alternates between drone footage, video-game animation, infomercials, original footage and text messages, we slowly piece together the nightmarish reality: Bêrîtan must obtain a facial cream from an arms dealer on the black market. This detail is a darkly humorous nod to YouTube tutorials that were popular over a decade ago for make-up and hairstyles to presumably help evade facial recognition software. Here, the cream enables one to enter Virtual Reality and thus remain undetected by the drones. Once she’s entered the VR space, Bêrîtan gets three “lives”— or three shots at climbing up to the next level to find her sister. Her first challenge takes place inside a Super Mario Bros. game, the second is inside the tactical shooter game Counter-Strike, and the third, on the depravity-stricken streets of GTA (Grand Theft Auto).

“My main themes are technology and pop culture,” Sahin explains her proclivity towards the fast-paced editing of gaming, Tik-Tok and the like. “I draw aesthetic inspiration from pop culture—or better, the aesthetic form of narrating information.” And while the plot of ROAD RUNNER sounds like a sci-fi dystopia, science fiction usually tells us more about the anxieties of the present than about futuristic fantasies. “I refer to technological developments a lot,” Sahin adds, “and to the idea that any new technology that enters our lives has first been used in a warzone. I try to do work which is anchored in real life.”

Turkey’s use of so-called killer drones against Kurdish militia along the Euphrates River is currently making its way into news headlines. Less spoken about, however, is the subjugation of Kurds in Turkey, where the Kurdish language was previously banned. (The video’s moody soundtrack puts a Kurdish-language pop ballad centre stage.) But viewers actually don’t need to know all that to experience the work, have a response to it, or ‘get’ it. "I didn’t want to make an essay film, as I like the idea of science fiction as narration much more,” Sahin explains, as we discuss the common pitfalls of art that are “about” something, the shortcomings of works buttressed by their relating to a political topic. It’s a conversation that has sparked a vehement debate in the art world recently, following the publication of an essay by art writer Dean Kissick in Harper’s Magazine, in which he argues against the artistic value of such attempts, whose claim to “raise awareness” of war and suffering oftentimes comes at the cost of the actual artistry.

“I think if you make art you can make it political to a certain level and be aware of its limitations too, because you can’t change the world, sadly, with [just] a work of art.” Sahin is interested in the ways in which history is told through culture—in the memorials and statues that dictators erect, but also in the representation of historical facts through popular culture and artefacts. She has funnelled much of that fascination into ROAD RUNNER and it makes for a worthy work of art.

Cemile Sahin’s solo exhibition ‘ROAD RUNNER’ is on view at Esther Schipper, Berlin, from February 1 – March 5, 2025, and will continue at ICA Milano from March 27 – July 11, 2025.