The Corona Pandemic has refined more activities than usual to the family home. As a consequence we intend to use our living room as the exclusive studio place for the manufacturing of an exhibition for HOME (Frankfurt/Tel Aviv): All artefacts will be entirely recruited from household objects. Books and magazines will serve as a source for collage paper works, glasses, vases, cutlery and plates function as the groundwork for sculptural collages. Carpets and pieces of furniture will be our substitute canvases for a series of paintings. This indoor effort will simulate a lockdown of all artistic activities to a studio space that inescapably unfolds between sofa and armchairs, tables, stools and across all floors.
The products of these efforts will be featured in short videos we will stage at our living room studios in Mühlheim am Main. Furthermore they will form the basis of an interim exhibition at “Gustav”, a living room project space in Wanne-Eickel, Germany. Videos and exhibition will be accompanied by a soundtrack provided by the musician and composer Steve Jansen.
The home studio work, the videos and the exhibition serve as a laboratory in which we intend to conceive the modulus for an open form exhibition project. It will provide us with a blue print that will allow us to respond with great flexibility to the specific requirements of each of the sites of the HOME project.
Though we will not (or hardly ever) leave the house for our project for HOME, its narrative will provide a rich fabric of tales of journeys and migration. All of the images and objects that become source and ingredient of our homebrew endeavour, will bring their own story, their own history with them. All has been in use before as a part of storyholding, a part of family life, representing private sentiment along with cultural heritage, rich with the sediments of time and the tear and ware of having been handled over and over again. With the means of collage and painting we will introduce our own narratives – not in an approach to overwrite, but to create and further develop a dialogue by freely weaving into such fabric of tales.
With a longstanding background of migration in our family within the last four generations, from Turkey to Romania/Bulgary/Cherkessia to Turkey to Germany, we find ourselves rooted in more than one country, in more than one culture. Here memories and narratives know more than one place and sometimes it is the blending of locations and cultures that completes an appropriate image for us. Some of our projects in HOME showcase an intimate family connection. Honouring the memory of our paternal grandmother, a carpet designer and manufacturer, our carpet paintings are a vital part of an artistic intercultural lineage.