Fırat Engin

Homeland, 2017, Bed, neon, 190 × 140 cm

This work adopts a critical stance towards the homelessness, displacement, and loss of belonging experienced by people who have been uprooted, exiled, or forced to migrate for a variety of political, cultural, economic, and other reasons, often on the basis of identity, language, religion, ethnicity, and related factors. Although every individual should possess equal rights and social freedoms, people inevitably bear the social and cultural weight—and the responsibilities—of the geography into which they are born. In this sense, the fate of a geography becomes the fate of the individual.The bed featured in the work, together with the red neon inscription above it—“the one and only true homeland”—seeks to redefine the notion of homeland, traditionally determined by geographical borders, as a more personal and fundamental sphere of existence through the associations of shelter, warmth, comfort, and peace evoked by the bed.