Home Sweet Home

Volkan Aslan’s video installation Home Sweet Home (2017) is a meditative take on the realities of displacement. With its disjunctions of time and perspective, and imagery of water and travel, the work commemorates individuals forced to make long journeys, such as migrants or those who have suffered a loss of home. Home Sweet Home is also a poetic parable about the way in which we all share an itinerant and fragile human condition, even though each of us may experience this condition differently.

The three-channel video installation, set within the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul, takes as its starting point a tragic image of human itinerancy: a hybrid boat-home structure commonly found in poor areas within large cities, and used to create temporary dwellings on bodies of water. A woman sits on the front of a boat, looks out on to the water and observes the passing landscape. Scenes of domestic interiors and daily routines meld with views of landscapes, shores and city views. As the work develops, we see, with bitter-sweet irony, that the three places in the film – which initially seemed distinct – are in fact depictions of different views onto linked realities.

The film speaks of various forms of collapse: of the security of home; of the architecture of inside and outside. It reflects meditatively on a world upended and inverted, in which many are on the move and in disarray, where even tragedies that initially seemed to be too distant to affect us are closer than we think, and neighbours we may not know are in fact right beside us.