Discipline: Fine arts
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.
Onur Gökmens' exhibition at Salt Galata: Subsoil
From April 2 to May 3, 2026, Onur Gökmen’s exhibition Toprakaltı can be visited at SALT Galata. The artist also worked on the project during his residency at the Tarabya Cultural Academy from June to September 2025. The exhibition revisits a largely overlooked episode in the environmental and institutional history of Turkey: the detection of radioactive contamination in Black Sea tea following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
In the aftermath of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a team of scientists at Middle East Technical University (METU)—including the artist’s parents, İnci and Ali Gökmen—conducted a study to measure the impact of radioactive fallout on tea grown in the Black Sea region. The findings were compiled in a report and submitted to the relevant authorities. Yet, official statements tended to minimize the extent of the contamination and health risks, reflecting concerns over economic and social stability. Amid discussions around public health and accountability, the METU report eventually leaked to the press. While news coverage—often addressing the issue through mediatized images and headlines—generated a degree of public awareness, institutional responses remained largely unchanged, even as contaminated tea stayed in circulation. Sensational statements—such as “radioactive tea tastes even better” or “a little radiation is good for the bones”—overlooking the effects of radioactive contamination, along with images of state officials drinking tea, lingered in the collective memory. Meanwhile, tea became both a material witness to imperceptible radiation and a carrier of nuclear anxiety.
Staging three fragments from this major episode in Turkey’s nuclear history, the exhibition establishes a dialogue between narrative and evidence by blending fictional and documentary elements. The first part features a spatial fragment from METU, where the contamination in tea was first identified, alongside a documentary based on the account of İnci and Ali Gökmen. Set in a television studio, the second section reflects the intertwined relationships between media, state apparatuses, and bureaucracy. At the center of this installation is a short film inspired by news reports that construct a fictional image of the Black Sea while downplaying the level of radioactive material in the tea. Situated behind these two sets, the final part comprises photographs that seep through them, capturing the traces of the Chernobyl disaster in Turkey.
Tracing the movement of radiation through natural and institutional systems, these three scenes reveal how environmental harm—though invisible and slow—has shaped public health, policy, and societal narratives. They also remind us that radiation can never be fully consigned to the past: it belongs neither to a single generation nor to a specific geography. Just as radiation carried by clouds and seeping into the ground is transmitted to the present through the soil, the images of this incident continue to circulate in personal and collective memory.
Panel: Artist & Collector Talks – On making and collecting video art
On the morning of April 4th the Elgiz Museum is in collaboration with the Tarabya Cultural Academy presenting a panel discussion that addresses the production of video art, video collecting, and the contemporary transformation of the video medium from different perspectives. It aims to open a space for dialogue between the artist and the collector through video art, and to reflect on the intersections of different practices of production and collecting.
The panel brings together Annika Kahrs, the artist of the video work titled “A BIG YEAR”, which was recently included in the Elgiz Collection, and also a participant of the Tarabya Cultural Academy’s artist residency program for the February–May 2026 term, with Agah Uğur, a collector focusing on video and new media art in his collection. The discussion will be moderated by artist, academic, and director Zeyno Pekünlü.
As the capacity is limited, a registration form must be filled to register.
Click here for the registration form
April 4, 2026, Saturday, 11:00–12:30h
Location: Elgiz Museum
Annika Kahrs (b. 1984)
Annika Kahrs lives and works in Berlin. Her performances, film and sound installations show in various ways the importance of acoustic information in the form of music and sound in different social, cultural and political structures of coexistence. Kahrs has received in recent years numerous awards and scholarships, which include the Mercedes-Benz Art Scope & Arts Initiative Tokyo in Japan (2024), at Casa Baldi of the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome, Italy (2024) and at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, USA (2023). Nominated for the shortlist of the Pauli Prize (formerly the Böttcherstraße Bremen Art Prize) in the autumn of 2024, her works have been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions.
Agah Uğur (b. 1957)
In addition to his long-standing executive career in the business world, Agah Uğur is known for his contemporary art collecting, particularly focusing on video and new media art. Following his experience in international companies, he held senior executive and CEO positions at Borusan Holding. Today, he continues to take an active role in various companies and initiatives while deepening his engagement with contemporary art through his collecting practice.
Zeyno Pekünlü (b. 1980)
Zeyno Pekünlü is an artist whose artistic interventions mostly take the form of videos and installations. Her work has been shown both locally and internationally, including at institutions such as IMMA (Dublin), SALT (Istanbul), Istanbul Modern, CAC Brétigny, the Jewish Museum (New York), the MAXXI Museum (Rome), the Whitechapel Gallery (London), and the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). She has also participated in major biennials such as the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Jakarta Biennale, and EVA International. Together with Köken Ergun, she co-founded the KIRIK initiative. She is on the editorial board of Red Thread Journal.
Esra Ersen
Esra Ersen studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Marmara University in Istanbul and completed a post-graduate program at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. In her research-based practice, she treats questions of history and historical perspectives and their reverberations over time in everyday culture, education, and cultural symbols. National identities and the mechanisms of their construction are recurring motifs in her work, in which she seeks to bridge the gap between oral tradition and collective memory, between micro-history and macro-history. She meets her chosen questions with a cheerful subversiveness to make the multi-layered, sometimes contradictory aspects of our social reality visible. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the 14th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (2015), the 277th São Paulo Biennale (2006), the 4th Liverpool Biennale (2006), the 4th Kwangju Biennale (2002), and Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main (2002). She has also received many prizes and grants, including the 2019–2020 Rome Prize of the Villa Massimo.
Ersa Ersen was a resident at Tarabya Culture Academy from September to November 2015.
Esra Ersen studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Marmara University in Istanbul and completed a post-graduate program at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. In her research-based practice, she treats questions of history and historical perspectives and their reverberations over time in everyday culture, education, and cultural symbols. National identities and the mechanisms of their construction are recurring motifs in her work, in which she seeks to bridge the gap between oral tradition and collective memory, between micro-history and macro-history. She meets her chosen questions with a cheerful subversiveness to make the multi-layered, sometimes contradictory aspects of our social reality visible. She has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the 14th Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (2015), the 277th São Paulo Biennale (2006), the 4th Liverpool Biennale (2006), the 4th Kwangju Biennale (2002), and Manifesta 4, Frankfurt am Main (2002). She has also received many prizes and grants, including the 2019–2020 Rome Prize of the Villa Massimo.
Ersa Ersen was a resident at Tarabya Culture Academy from September to November 2015.
