Timișoara City Hall

Homeland

“The home is lost. The home died. The home is behind me now.” In Halil Altındere’s video Homeland, the Syrian rapper Mohammed Abu Hajar takes us on a journey from a bombed Syria to Istanbul’s Basilica Cistern, and on to the defunct Tempelhof Airport, which now serves as a temporary refugee camp in Berlin. With a music video-like effect, we are thrown into a violent story about an ongoing war, where people are fleeing for their lives with the hope that Europe will open its borders. The fast tempo shifts, electronic soundtrack, and dramatic content are reminiscent of Hollywood film dramaturgy, but Homeland intersperses fiction with documentary. With a drone’s aggressive top-down perspective, the film examines Fortress Europe’s ruthless barbed wire fence.

Altındere has long been interested in issues of migration, identity, and gender in relation to the repressive, patriarchal, and nationalist structures in Turkey. He is often collaborating with various groups, for example a group of Roma youths in Istanbul who are the main protagonists in the video Wonderland. Recorded right before the Gezi uprising, their hip-hop band gives voice to the resistance against gentrification. Another project examines the history of the first, and so far only, Syrian cosmonaut, Mohammed Ahmed Faris, who joined a 1987 Soviet space mission. Now he is a refugee in Istanbul. For this year’s biennial in Venice, Altındere contributed a new pavilion, Neverland, which only consists of a façade, drawing attention to underrepresented and marginalized people, including his own Kurdish minority.