IREM GUNAYDIN

İrem Günaydın’s works unfold through writing as a speculative and para-fictional tool, one that probes the conditions of artmaking by engaging with the edges of narrative, form, and institutional memory. Oscillating between textual and spatial gestures, she works across mediums to construct aesthetic infrastructures that investigate the discarded, the supplemental, the misfiled, the misread. She often begins with a letter, an archive, a myth, or a rumor and then folds it inward, reframing it as a conceptual score, a structural support, or a performative frame. Günaydın treats the “parergon,” that which is considered outside, secondary, or ornamental, as central to her inquiry. Her practice insists on re-seeing the overlooked: a Medusa turned mold, a buried collection of flint and botanical remnants, a bastardized table, a studio that isn’t hers. These are not metaphors but working sites. Through typographic displacements, architectural recodings, and narrative duplications, she examines how symbols, bodies, and materials circulate, shift, and collapse under the weight of contextual reassignment.

Deeply invested in the folds between high theory and pop ephemera, her works stage playful yet precise dialogues between Derridean structures, minor anecdotes, and cartoons that puncture representational logic. A message in a bottle may travel through a myth, a biennial, a film still, a bureaucratic form, or a dinner table, each becoming both delivery system and conceptual residue.

Günaydın’s work often exists in states of adjacency: script and sculpture, archive and excavation, mold and monument, figure and shadow. She performs with and through the gaps in knowledge systems, offering not closure, but carefully constructed disorientation. What remains after history, after art, after authorship is where her work begins.

İrem Günaydın (b. 1989, Istanbul) lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

Günaydın holds a Foundation diploma from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2011), and her BA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, London (2014). Her recent solo exhibitions include Scripted Expanded Molded I and Salad Cake at THE PILL (Istanbul, 2022 & 2020) as well as Entrée, Martch Studio (Ayvalik, 2021), From A Tummy To The Sky Via A Mouth, Ark Kultur (Istanbul, 2017) and Ænd, Torna (Istanbul, 2016). Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as Red Bull Art Around (Istanbul, 2016); PRODUCE #3 - The Game Settled Into a Cagey Midfield Match, Elhamra Han (Istanbul, 2016) and Mamut Art Project (Istanbul, 2015). In 2023 she was the recipient of a fellowship residency at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany and in 2024 she was invited to the SAHA Studio Residency Program in Istanbul.