About The Artist: Irem Günaydin

T H E  P I L L ® is pleased to announce İrem Günaydın’s third solo show at the gallery titled ABOUT THE ARTIST between the dates 7 March - 23 May 2026. 

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST turns the gallery space into an immersive and interactive environment where a single monumental sculpture stands alone against a backdrop of currency exchange records and real-time data flows. Operating at the intersection of financial transactions, currency value, weather reports, and wind patterns, the exhibition puts on display the recent history of dispossession in Turkey through the evolution of currency exchange rates of the last 24 years, re-imagined as an evolving climate. It also marks a third iteration in a series of conceptual propositions by Irem Günaydın, bringing into play transformed elements from her previous two solo exhibitions at the gallery.

 

Irem Günaydın’s thought process builds upon a concise conceptual and formal vocabulary to explore what remains at the edges of narrative, form, and institutional memory. In this exhibition, this unfolds through elements such as a fiberglass mold in a specific green color, the use of scale and repetition as political tools, and the figure of Bugs Bunny. With this vocabulary, Irem Günaydın shape-shifts between script, form, frame, mold, and scale. This time, with its tautological title, the exhibition reveals the artist as an unstable yet continuous fiction conjured into reality through instances of institutional critique in changing forms, ranging from a conceptual score in written form to a trickster multiplication of the self through substitution, deployed as agile escape and proliferation strategies. 

 

The frame, setting the boundary of representation, simultaneously stabilizing and setting in motion both the work of art and the labor of living, constitutes the object of inquiry in ABOUT THE ARTIST. This time, alongside the institutional framing of art, it is the larger institutional frames governing our lives that are at stake. As Bugs Bunny shifts from a silhouette into a fiberglass mold in “toxic green”, Irem Günaydın insists on its grotesqueness as a figure in blown-up scale, opening a discussion around the artist-as-activist, reduced to an inconvenience that must be contained by operations of minimizing. What Irem Günaydın chooses to upscale in the site-specific installation Weather Report is precisely that which is minimized in the hopes that it would disappear through the cracks of institutional discourse. And this organized amnesia is precisely what 75 foreign exchange tickets chosen from the last 24 years and blown up into an architectural scale is here to defy. The immersive environment urges us to remember and to confront, through this precision, the making of our current conditions of existence through the evidence - a counter-archive - displayed in a dizzying scale: the diminishing value of our smallest common denominator. And this covers everything from currency to social contract.

 

With ABOUT THE ARTIST, we move from the wild and joyous imagination connecting Cézanne’s truth in painting, the red and blue pills of The Matrix and Bugs Bunny at work in Salad Cake (2020), and through Scripted Expanded Molded I’s (2023) art-historical discussion of bastards and bastardization as a strategy of rebellious appropriation of what is held off-the-frame, to arrive here: the tone turns dark, the atmosphere thickens. The apple seems rotten, yes, there is something rotten in the state we’re in. And yet, The Fourth Bunny,  sits coherently next to The Fourth Medusa and The Fourth Table also known as the Bastard, turning the number four from an ordinal number to an ontological position, a suffix, a condition of being-after-too-many-times. As such, The Fourth Bunny is a monument to continuity through shape-shifting; a stand-in for organized memory, and now, it has the capacity to replicate itself infinitely through fibers of glass, the other smallest common denominator shaping our world. 

 

As Irem Günaydın writes: In this exhibition, minimization is no longer an option.

 

İrem Günaydın is an artist and suffix based in Istanbul, who works after authorship, occupying the remainder, the footnote, the administrative trace. Her work unfolds 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 media to construct aesthetic infrastructures that investigate the discarded, the supplemental, the misfiled, the misread.