A site-responsive soundscape from artist Güler Ates, in collaboration with Leyla Huysal and Yusuf Huysal.
Tuesday 17 March 2026 – Sunday 30 August 2026
Museum of the Home, 136 Kingsland Rd, London E2 8EA
Free
In Perpetuum is a four‑channel sound piece with no beginning or end. It invites visitors to slow down and inhabit the space, guided by the themes of ambiguity, the unknown, and belonging, amidst the Museum’s period rooms. Each time someone listens, the experience is different. As distinct elements loop across four channels at varying durations, the sound piece creates moments that have never sounded quite the same and never will again. In Perpetuum merges sound elements from both shared and individual experiences of voluntary or involuntary displacement to create an emotional and physical environment shaped by collective presence, memory, and listening. The installation explores the notion of unhomely spaces, where familiarity and estrangement coexist. The work reflects on how spaces and sounds associated with home, community, and memory can feel simultaneously intimate and alien, revealing the tensions and ambiguities inherent in the act of belonging. In Perpetuum is a collaboration between Güler Ates, Leyla Huysal and Yusuf Huysal. The sound piece is inspired by Leyla and Yusuf’s own interpretations of the Unhomely in relation to folk and experimental music from around the world.
About the Project
This new commission by Culture& and Museum of the Home is part of The Unhomely, a public programme co-produced by Culture& that examines how histories of migration, displacement, belonging, and Identity shape personal and collective understandings of home. Funded by Arts Council England. Through art exhibitions, interventions, events, and creative research, the programme seeks to create a space where artists, curators, and communities can explore what it means to live between worlds where the familiar becomes strange, and the past continues to echo within the present. The Unhomely draws on psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny and the notion of hauntology, the ghostly return of historical events. At it’s core, the programme asks: What happens when something once familiar becomes strange? How is the idea of “home” unsettled through migration, climate crisis, inherited memory and cultural displacement?
About Güler Ates
Güler Ates works with Video, Photography, Printmaking, Sound Art and Performance. At the heart of her work lies an exploration into the experience of cultural displacement. Manifestations of Ates’s work are realised through performance and site-responsive activities that merge Eastern and Western sensibilities. The architectural sites that Ates works within are of a particular era with specific links to colonialism, now post-colonialism, and the ‘East’, and she finds that they are interesting to work in, in their own right. Ates conducts research into the history of these sites, which informs the source of the fabric that becomes a costume or veil for her performing model to wear. As part of the performance, the subject tells a story drawn from the history of the site, exploring her feeling of cultural duality.
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Lead Image Credit: Luke Hayes
