Mehtap Baydu: Loving Is You So Hard!

The artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Turkey, at Arter.

Arter presents the first institutional solo exhibition of Mehtap Baydu in Turkey. Curated by Selen Ansen, the show moves across performance, sculpture, photography, and video—a layered space where body and object enter into exchange. At its heart, the Nefes (Atem) performance, first staged in a public vitrine in Berlin, is re-adapted for Arter’s space.

Baydu works by making molds, multiplying, fragmenting, leaving traces, layering one form over another. The result is a body that is collective rather than singular — built from her own, opened out to others, extended toward the non-human. The exhibition gathers new work made for this occasion alongside a selection of recent pieces, set among the process records and performative traces that surround them.

At its center stands Wirbelsäule (Spinal Column), a four-meter column assembled from casts of the artist’s own body, interlocked and stacked. It holds two ideas at once: load-bearing endurance, and the threat of breaking apart. A figure suspended between stability and fragility.

Burulma (Torsion), a video shown here for the first time, comes out of a performance staged in a forest in 2025, during a residency at The Watermill Center in New York. Body and surroundings change places; earth meets sky.

Then there is Nefes (Atem). First performed in 2019 in a public vitrine in Berlin, it is re-adapted here for an art institution for the first time. Baydu inflates a balloon made to the exact volume of the room, giving her invisible breath a physical form until it fills the space entirely. Visitors watch from behind glass. The live performance runs for roughly twenty days from the opening.