It has been challenging to find a home for her work in Turkey, since publications favor glossy images that accentuate beauty. “The mainstream narrative is about selling the idea of a good life,” Şahin explains, which puts her in a bind since beauty and positivity are never the point of her work. If anything, it is pain she hopes to explore in her collages. “I’m not a ‘Life is great!’ type of person, since some of the things I experienced during my childhood removed this illusion,” she says. “When you’re eight or nine but faced with the dark side of life, it’s impossible to be much of an optimist.”
The war in Russia changed Şahin’s work, too: “I realized the things we dream of can crumble suddenly, that the people we know can disappear in a day. Now I think the only true things in life are death and love.” This perspective is evident in her collages, where double-page spreads reminiscent of magazine layouts abound, but the captions touch on transience and suffering. One collage is accompanied by a quote on self-deception, borrowed from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.” Another includes a passage from Stanisław Lem’s sci-fi novel, “Solaris,” on the cyclical nature of suffering.
