BERLIN.- In a time of fractured geographies and contested histories, what does it mean to love a homeland? Is homeland a site of longing or a burden of history? Presenting newly commissioned works by Anita Muçolli and Sevil Tunaboylu alongside earlier pieces by Ian Waelder, this exhibition questions the contradictions of belonging, where love is entwined with alienation, and attachment collides with critique. Navigating exile, resistance, and the fluidity of identity, the artists interrogate the meaning of home, not as a fixed place but as a shifting terrain of politics and emotion.

Together, their works reflect on the effects of migration on both personal and collective identity, tensions between embodying cultural heritage and assimilation, and the emotional legacies of displacement. Arising from chance meetings and ongoing exchanges, the included artists unfold narratives specific to the experience of second and third generation migrants, who inherit both the trauma and the nostalgia.

The exhibition title is drawn from Oxana Timofeeva’s How to Love a Homeland, a publication I encountered almost by accident but whose resonance was immediate and disarming. Like the works assembled in the exhibition, her words lingered as both question and companion. Conversations with the artists unfolded in similar ways: personal and charged with inherited complexity.

Sevil Tunaboylu reflects on her family’s migrations from Skopje to Turkey, her grandfather’s carpentry, and her ongoing collaboration with her father. Her work draws on archival materials and oral histories from a research trip to Skopje. Spanning the 1950s to today, the project gathers fragments of inherited memories, unspoken stories, and the image of childhood doors. The works form a constellation of objects that reflect not only on migration, craftsmanship, ghosts, restlessness, and the act of inhabiting life. In her work, the distinction between object and image collapses. Tunaboylu does not attempt to recreate home but reflects how it is remembered and disjointed, investigating how memory clings to things.

The in-betweens are also examined in Anita Muçolli’s newly commissioned installation that examines the emotional and bureaucratic thresholds of her family’s migration from Kosovo to Switzerland in the early 1990s. Drawing from personal stories, family photographs, and bureaucratic documents, she explores how the social ecosystem and its familiar codes to migrants remain incomprehensible to bureaucratic systems built on statistics. She asks: what did it mean to inhabit a country not as guests, but as undocumented individuals? Her works render questions tactile, creating a temporal zone of endurance and illegibility. In doing so, her work asks how the body remembers what the system forgets.

This inscription of how memory lingers in the body, as a trace or inherited sensibility, continues in the work of Ian Waelder, which explores familial migration and the physical remnants of history. In his sound installation FRIEDRICH (2020), Waelder collaborates posthumously with his grandfather, a German-Jewish pianist exiled in Chile during the Third Reich. The record plays back loss and continuity: sound as a living archive, improvisation as survival. Waelder’s research often begins with objects. The Opel Olympia, once owned by his grandfather and sold to fund his exile, becomes a vehicle for tracing intergenerational trauma and displacement. This story becomes sculptural through plaster reproduction of the Olympia, made with his father, sculptor Juan Waelder. The car’s fragility speaks to the difficulty of reconstructing lost things. In counterpoint, a photograph of a Monstera plant, gifted to his parents on his birth and still thriving, becomes a living archive and a botanical memory amid metallic history.

Together the works echo that homeland is neither inherited nor chosen, but constructed from fragments of memory, gestures, unresolved emotions, and unanswered questions. Through doors, photographs, documents, cars, plants, and soundscapes, the artists attest to how attachment emerges not despite displacement, but because of it. Homeland here is shown as a process constantly unfolding. In Timofeeva's words, “Across all states’ borders tying us to a certain territory by protocol, the love for homeland must be free, so that every time, coming back to a new, unprecedented place, every one of us can say: I am from here.”

Curator: Hana Halilaj

[1] Oxana Timofeeva, How to Love a Homeland, 2020, Cairo: Kayfa Ta, pp. 43.

The exhibition will open on the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2025.