Beren Tezcanli
The Living Room
Installation
Old furniture, textile, various objects,
Video (color, sound, 2.20 min)
200 x 300 x 200 cm
Identity, Past, Formation, Belonging, Existence
Beren Tezcanli’s installation ‘The Living Room’ takes a journey to her own individual roots and recalls her childhood memories by restaging her grandparents living room, which she defines as a homely feeling. In her installation she displays pieces of furniture, decorative objects and traditional fabrics to resonate her own roots.
This installation, The Living Room, explores the problematic impacts of her own family roots. Beren is in search of the pressure and the restrictions that her education created, starting from her own experiences and memories. She explores how roots form our identity. At the starting point of her project she realized that even though she went far away from her family at a young age (17), the family voice is always present on her mind and sometimes dominated her own voice. Precisely this family voice was implemented in different works of her installation, ‘The Living Room’, by written hidden messages on several objects. The text of the hidden messages are sentences she remembered her family was repetitively addressing to her during her childhood. The video playing on the monitor titled ‘Freeing From A Lot’ is showing scenes from her own childhood also with hidden comments. The movie is a reflection from Tezcanli’s past to her present memory.
