No Other Home: the Crimean Tatar Repatriates September 25, 2010

In May of 2008, Maria Sonevytsky and Alison Cartwright traveled throughout Crimea (Krym) - the scenic peninsula jutting out from southern Ukraine into the Black Sea - gathering stories and songs that told of the Crimean Tatars' decades-long struggle to return to their motherland. Forcibly relocated by Stalin in 1944, the Tatars began to return to Crimea only in the last twenty years. The stories of the twenty-six families interviewed for this exhibit reveal how the memory of exile and uncertain prospects for the future manifest in their daily lives determine what "home" is for these people who have for so long lived without it. The sound components for the exhibit are fitted into repurposed, old soviet-produced telephones. Each telephone is a unique design with dialing instructions provided for listening to voice or music recordings related to a particular photograph or cluster of photos. The exhibit includes 32 photographs.