NEIGHBOR

2018, Two-Channel Video Projection on Canvas, 17 minutes 30 seconds, Color, Stereo Sound

The project Neighbor started to build around the photographs taken by 13 years old Arif, who is a refugee from Syria. Arif migrated to Turkey with his family in 2015 from a city that had experienced the catastrophe in a very deep sense: Aleppo. In the summer of 2017, he photographed his friends and his environment from his own perspective. These photographs serve as a documentation of a refugee life that was resettled and drawn by the ongoing crisis. Arif is a kid who works every day, collecting cardboard and paper on the streets of a neighborhood in Ankara in order to help his family to maintain a living in the course of growing disagreements in the Turkish society after 3.5 million refugees were resettled inside the borders of Turkey.

Five months later, in the winter of 2018, after a conflict broke out between Arif’s family and other families in the neighborhood, Arif and his family decided to move. Neighbor contains a walk tracing the photographs made by Arif until we arrive at the middle of the neighborhood, he was living in. In this manner, a connection was made with the simplest form of traveling: walking. A connection made between the places that Arif photographed and the places he lived in but were never the subject of his photographs. The duration of the video also becomes significant as it stands out to represent a physical distance. A distance between belonging and longing, temporality and invisibility, familiarity and otherness.