Type: Exhibition
Year: 2025
Size: 273 m²
Location: Bomonti, Istanbul
Client: Türkiye Republic Ministry of Family and Social Services
Team: Yasemin D. Karaca, Asude A. Yılmaz, Beyza Kurt
Status: Completed
Photos: Sezer Alçınkaya

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” — Leo Tolstoy

The exhibition reimagines Tolstoy’s famous line as an immersive journey through the fragile
architecture of family life. Visitors enter through a child’s drawing of a house, stepping into a
sequence of rooms where everyday symbols of domesticity — the door, the sofa, the train
station, the schoolyard, the park bench — transform into stages of solitude, separation, and
memory.

Each space combines hand-drawn illustrations with cinematic video screens, creating an
uncanny overlap between the familiar and the unsettling. A bench recalls someone long
gone, a schoolyard echoes with silence, a fragmented family scene lingers in time.
AI-generated moving images populate these illustrated settings, giving voice to unseen
emotions and hidden fractures.

At the heart of the experience is an interactive element: a button labeled “Could be
different.” When pressed, the black-and-white images of sorrow and stillness begin to
move. Color slowly emerges, and each scene transforms — a lonely figure is joined by
another, silence turns into conversation, separation gives way to reunion. What begins as a
portrait of disconnection evolves into a vision of hope.

The design language is intentionally hybrid: flat illustrations layered with three-dimensional
furniture and theatrical lighting create the sensation of walking into a storybook, only to
realize its pages are filled with real human vulnerability. Bright colors and playful outlines
clash with black-and-white portraits, underscoring the contrast between idealized images of
family happiness and the diverse realities of loss, distance, and disconnection.

All Happy Families Are Alike is not simply an exhibition but a staged narrative. It invites
viewers to enter a familiar image of “home,” and to confront the multiplicity of untold stories
behind its walls — stories of loneliness, resilience, and the human need for belonging.