“Eve Dönmek İstemiyorum” – 24 June / 3 September 2023 @ Feshane, Istanbul

Based on Zafer Aracagök’s experimental narrative “I Don’t Want to Go Back Home” (1995), the group exhibition of the same name is opening today at Feshane in Istanbul. Curated by Ahmet Ergenç, the exhibition focuses on critical contemporary issues and positions such as home, nest, identity, abandonment, nomadisation, homelessness, belonging-lessness, crises and liberation. In his narrative, Aracagök takes the issue of “returning home”, one of the founding themes of literature, as his point of departure and reflects on the meanings of not returning home, travelling, metamorphosis, leaving familiar territories and becoming a “nomad” both physically and intellectually. Returning home is a critical leitmotiv in many narratives. The hero sets out to ‘return home one day’, like Odysseus. But what if the departing hero refuses to return home? What if there is no home to return to? What if what is called home is a fiction to be escaped from? Leaving home means leaving the grand narrative into which one is born (home, history, official ideology, identity, given subject positions, etc.) and involves a rootlessness, a groundlessness, a rootlessness that is also the beginning of ‘modernity’. Language has a special place in this movement towards leaving home: Language is the house of being and the Law, so for a leaving and liberation it is necessary to leave language as we know it, perhaps to start speaking in a ‘barbaric’ language that would distort meaning.

More info @ Feshane