Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home is a slow burn that reveals glimpses of two lives, lived side-by-side on a boat on the Bosporus strait, proving the concept of the neighbourhood as a relief to loneliness with its houses floating on water. These two, the fictional houses representing complementary households, attain a grain of realism with some objects in 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 Biennal, 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 a loss of home. The video is also a poetic parable about the way in which we all share this itinerant and fragile human condition, even though each of us may experience this condition differently.