İrem Günaydın

İrem Günaydın (b. 1989, Istanbul) lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Irem 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,” March Studio (Ayvalik, 2021), “From A Tummy To The Sky Via A Mouth,” Ark Kultur (Istanbul, 2017) and “Ænd,” Torna (Istanbul, 2016).

Recipient of a fellowship residency at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany in 2023, İrem Günaydın’s practice revolves around her interest in being an artist in an ontological sense. Her work seeks to perforate the tightly knit textures of art history, the autonomy of the self, and the fetish of authenticity and originality. This attitude allows the artist to think without establishing a new center, an original, or a singular truth. She explores the relationship between text and image and the ways in which words and images circulate between discursive and pictorial realms, investigating the objecthood of language and the grammar of images. Günaydin’s practice is often generated through writing and unfolds in the form of installations gathering moving images, objects, prints, and sculptural elements while writing functions as a fulcrum. She draws inspiration from art history, literature, film, and music, deconstructing the canon with minor narratives and elements from contemporary popular media.

In her written works, she sheds light on the diagnosis of the "I" and its implications for artistic expression. In her abstract narrative writing, Gunaydin splits herself into multiples that become spectators of one another and engage in conversations, addressing the economic realities of life as an artist and issues surrounding the recognition of artmaking as labor. Using scriptwriting and translation as generative tools, her work often leads to collaborative iterations encompassing film, performance, and public installations. 

OPUS: A PARA-OPERA STRUCTURE

OPUS: A Para-Opera Structure is a long-term research-based foundation free of walls incorporating text, design, publication, and performing arts. It is a scaffold to co-construct, support, and maintain relationships with people who are invited for collaboration as it progresses. It represents research to be carried out over time on the intersection and interweaving of the following bodies: support, structure, justice, protest, resistance, truth, their connotation, event, as the text, and text as all. It attempts to contextualize a living structure that seeks ways to draw the line, withdraw, diverge, and rupture between these bodies and put the distinction between them under erasure. It is an attempt to engender a table of contents, which need not be rigid but should be seen continuously evolving through research and collaborations.

OPUS attempts to blur the distinction between fact and fiction as a parafictional strategy through make-believe. It attempts to look for models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blur the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction. OPUS is structured into fragments. The first one conceived at SAHA Studio is Konvolut, which is used for grouping sections of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project - one that refers to a bundle of manuscripts or printed materials that belong together. Each written passage is sent to the invited collaborators, who pen these passages anew with their own handwriting. The letters O, P, U, and S in their sentences will be incorporated into the rest of the passage in their own handwriting. Passages are written using a bespoke typeface titled Hamaset. It is designed exclusively for OPUS to evoke the grandeur of opera as a conceptual gesture. Meaning “enthusiasm and heroism” in Arabic, Hamaset has been turned into a verb by the politicians in contemporary Turkish, altered in the sense that it now connotes populism and demagogy instead. As OPUS progresses, the font family of Hamaset will expand with bespoke versions that conceptually fit each fragment. Hamaset is monumental, sharp, and prickly on the outside but soft and round on the inside to create dialectical tension. Through an iteration of letters of O, P, U, and S in different handwriting for each passage, the ontology of the work will be put into effect, not merely described or denoted. The very first passage of the Konvolut is a national Palestinian dish: Musakhan. 

“ON THE EASTERN COAST OF THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, EXPLOSIONS LIGHT UP THE NIGHT SKY AS THE MOTHER PREPARES A SUMAC SPICED MUSAKHAN DISH WITH SWEET ONIONS, PINE NUTS, AND TABOON BREAD.”