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Aykan Safoğlu

The audiovisual work of artist Aykan Safoglu begins with a triggering moment: the fall of a tree outside his window one night. Starting from this occurrence, evoking deracination, Safo lu looks back on the summer holidays he used to spend with his parents on the North Aegean island of Imbros, which he narrates in voiceover. In the video, he shows fragments of photographic records from a family album, which he has shredded, reassembled and trampled. Filmed from a high angle and played in a rhythmical way “in reverse,” like an attempt to erase the past or to “turn back the clock,” this audiovisual tale reveals a painful personal history evoking the experience of exile and being torn between two countries, Germany and Turkey.