In Homer's "Odyssey," Penelope, the patient wife of Odysseus, weaves a burial shroud for her father-in-law Laertes while waiting for the return of her husband from the Trojan War. The war lasts for a decade; another 10 years pass before Odysseus finally returns home. Odysseus learns how his long absence has turned the attentions of her suitors to Penelope. But his faithful wife has turned all of them down by saying that she needs to weave the burial shroud. Weaving it in the morning and unraveling it at night, Penelope devotes three years to finishing the shroud, successfully turning down their offers. A similar scene appears in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" where two creepy women knit "black wool feverishly" in an office visited by the protagonist of the book, Marlow. Representing the "moirae", the Greek personification of fate, the women knit the black-colored future of both Marlow and Europe's colonial ambitions.

In Servet Koçyiğit's eight-minute-long video "99 Years," screening at Istanbul's Rampa Gallery until April 18 as part of his second solo exhibition "This is My Island," we watch a woman and man standing against a black background. We see lengths of multi coloured yarn coiled around the man's outstretched hands. She unravels the yarn, forming a sphere that gains shape, colour and meaning as the video progresses.

When I asked Koçyiğit about what inspired the video and how he had come up with the idea of using a yarn, he talked about how he had used yarn treads in his previous works, becoming familiar with them over a long period of time. "They always sell yarns in meters, like 100 meter yarn treads or 200 meter yarn treads," he said.

"To me they represent a certain distance. There is always a beginning and an end with yarns. In my video work the yarn gradually transforms into a globe. It is an ironic work. I based it on creation theories and mythologies. Only this time a man and a woman create the world together."

Born in the central Anatolian city of Kırşehir in 1971, Koçyiğit studied art at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam where he still lives and works. Koçyiğit participated in numerous important group exhibitions including the 27th Sao Paulo Biennale, 9th Istanbul Biennale and Biennale Cuvee, among many others. He held solo exhibitions at Nederlands Foto Museum in Rotterdam and Givon Art Gallery in Tel-Aviv.

According to art critic Duygu Demir, who wrote a piece about Koçyiğit's "This is My Island" exhibition, the durational title of "99 Years" and "the emergence of the toy-sized yarn globe in the video can be interpreted as a playful alternate to the monolithic stories of creationism in religions, teasing these narratives and challenging normative roles with a simple gesture of collaboration, proposing a duality."

The yarn globe appears in another work titled "Orbit." This time it is placed at the bottom of a bucket hung from the ceiling. "The absurdist tendencies in Koçyiğit's practice come to the fore in this work, as the toy globe with its plastic bucket universe looks awfully close to reality, surrounded by what appears to be endless darkness, only to be discovered as a small speck in the relational scale of things," Demir explains.

"'Orbit' was planned as a separate work," Koçyiğit told me. "Those works can be exhibited separately or together as in this exhibition. It is parody of how our world is hanging at the bottom of a construction bucket. Despite being a small work, I think ‘Orbit' is the work that defines Rampa's gallery space. There is the inner space of the bucket and then there is the outer space. Inside the bucket we have the globe. Everything else, including the viewer, exists outside it."

One of the most interesting works in the exhibition is a sculpture titled "I Kissed a Bear," depicting a polar bear kissing a giraffe. "That sculpture kind of summarizes the exhibition," Koçyiğit told me. "I wanted to choose two animals from very different parts of the world: a polar bear and giraffe... I wanted to choose two animals from different species, from different heights. I wanted to choose animals who have the same gender... In order to be able to have that kiss, those two animals have to pass many borders. Theirs is kind of an impossible love."

Perhaps the centrepiece of the exhibition, "This is My Island" consists of a series of collages that reflect on big subjects like history and the politics of borders and territories. According to Demir, Koçyiğit's "dominant use of the shemagh pattern, an instant connection to the keffiyeh, deliberately invokes the Middle East, but avoids specificity with its various colors, leaving it as an ambiguous departure point for the audience."

"'This is My Island' series started as fictive maps but I wanted each map to have it is own narrative and character," Koçyiğit told me. "Sewing is for me always about time and distance," he added. "I didn't only want to create geographical maps. For me they are more symbolic. I am interested in visualising and making a map of where we are standing at this moment. Those maps ask us questions about our connections to others. I made roads from simple sewing lines. I made cities from buttons. When you look at them, one can see how everything is connected. Sometimes you have to pass many borders. But there is always a strong possibility that you will meet someone in the end." Koçyiğit's career has so far been impressive: he has received several grants and prizes, including "the new best photographer of the year" award at Lianzhou Foto festival in China, the OC&V scholarship from Dutch Ministry of Culture, the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Fellowship and Working Grant at the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts. His "This is My Island" exhibition gives us that special thing: an island like space where the formation of a yarn globe gains special significance for visitors seeking a sanctuary at the heart of a crowded city.