Mehtap Baydu: Loving You Is So Hard!
Mehtap Baydu’s first institutional solo exhibition in Türkiye, Loving You Is So Hard!, brings together new works conceived for this context alongside a selection of the artist’s recent pieces. The exhibition highlights the interconnections and transitions Baydu forges across diverse media such as performance, sculpture, photography and video, creating a layered sensory space where body and objects engage in a mutual interaction. At the heart of Loving You Is So Hard! lies a multiplicity that opens onto ever-shifting forms of togetherness. The works Baydu realises by appropriating and transforming the narratives and elements embedded in her personal memory, by assuming various identities and engaging with non-human entities, point to a fluidity that subverts established definitions and fixed notions of selfhood.
Loving You Is So Hard! echoes the distance and the tension often intrinsic to desire with the promise of absolute proximity and a sense of implied absence that characterise the process of moulding central to Baydu’s practice. Engaging the will and fragility inherent in life, the presented works materialise an inclusive and collective body that is continuously shaped by the artist through multiplication, fragmentation, imprinting and overlapping. The exhibition’s spatial orchestration manifests the temporal and material plurality of each work by bringing together a selection of pieces produced in a range of materials and textures, including ceramics, bronze, fabric, paper, and glass, alongside the documentation and performative traces that surround these productions. Foregrounding a multifaceted artistic practice in which performance extends into objecthood, and the object fosters performative potentials, this spatial arrangement invites visitors to experience Baydu’s works through the concepts of in-betweenness, transformation and otherness.
Loving You Is So Hard! also features the performance Breath (Atem), which was first realised by Mehtap Baydu in 2019 inside a storefront space opening directly to the street in Berlin. By reconfiguring the work for the gallery space at Arter, the exhibition marks its inaugural enactment within an art institution. During the performance, which explores layered meanings of restraint, in-betweenness and void, Baydu materialises her invisible breath by inflating a balloon corresponding precisely to the volume of the area allocated for the work. The live performance of Breath (Atem) will take place intermittently during Arter’s visiting hours for approximately twenty days following the exhibition’s opening. Visitors will be able to view the performance, which will continue until the balloon inflated by Baydu completely fills the space, from behind a glass partition.
The exhibition also features an artwork that has been produced with the support of the Alumni Fonds of the Tarabya Cultural Academy.