Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home is a slow burn that reveals glimpses of two lives, lived side-by-side on a boat at the Bosphorus Strait, proving the concept of the neighbourhood as a relief from loneliness with their houses floating in the water. These two, the fictional houses representing complementary households, attain a grain of realism with some objects through the fleeting images, like a Murano ashtray which oozes a pleasant, familiar feeling mixed with images of the river as a symbolic and physical heart of the city. Commissioned by the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Volkan Aslan’s Home Sweet Home is a meditative take on the realities of displacement. With its disjunctions of time and perspective, and imagery of water and travel, the work contemplates two women forced to make long journeys, such as migrants or those who have suffered the loss of their home. The video is also a poetic parable about the way in which we all share this itinerant and fragile human condition, although each of us may experience this condition differently.