LOVE DON’T COST A THING (Red butterfly), 2026

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Cemile Sahin's work oscillates between film, photography, sculpture, and literature, freely deploying different media without privileging one over the other. Her practice engages with power structures, violence, technology and the ways in which media shape our understanding of history and reality. Drawing on the visual languages of cinema, television, advertising, digital culture, and Y2K aesthetics, Sahin works with saturated colour, glossy surfaces, staged imagery, montage, repetition, and popcultural iconography. Her highly constructed visual worlds combine the seductive language of popular culture with subjects that are often more complex and unsettling, allowing humour, artificiality, and darker undertones to exist side by side. For her edition, conceived especially for LEAP Art Foundation she turns to the subject of love, introducing a new body of work that will continue and expand in her solo exhibition at C/O Berlin in summer 2027. She is interested in the symbols, gestures, and objects through which love has been represented over time, isolating and recombining them with motifs drawn from popular culture. Her current research focuses on the ring finger and the centuries-old belief that a vein runs directly from it to the heart: a legend that has tied the ring finger to the heart and to love for centuries.

Exclusively for LEAP
Limited to 10 unique works