TOO CLOSE TO HOME


In the 1960s, a group of workers from Turkey emigrated to the Netherlands with the hope of working there temporarily and eventually returning to a more economically developed country. Yet, the global oil crisis that deepened from the 1970s onward, along with neoliberal policies and political ruptures in Turkey, gradually eroded the idea of returning to an imagined homeland. Over time, the interiors of the shops opened by the immigrants who remained in the Netherlands began to fill with images of a country that no longer existed, or perhaps had never existed at all. An imagined landscape in which time seemed almost suspended was carried abroad through oil‑painted vistas, decorative figurines, and nostalgic objects.

Metincan Güzel approaches these shops as scenographic sites where mythical scenes of faraway lands are constructed. He has spent time in the south of Rotterdam, engaging with shop owners and regulars, observing how diasporic spaces take shape. In Too Close to Home, Güzel transports cross‑sections of these shops into the exhibition space. Like unrealized dreams, these structures generate incomplete, scattered forms. Rebars and cardboard boxes signify both the possibility of movement and relocation, as well as the desire for belonging, persistence, and holding onto the past. Spanning between close and far, familiar and foreign, the installation points to how the landscape is continually reconstructed through objects, images, and desires.