Gasping for Air

Do museums breathe the same air we do? This question is posed throughout Loving You Is So Hard!, a solo exhibition of Mehtap Baydu, a Berlin–based Kurdish artist from Turkey, at Arter in Istanbul. At the center of the exhibition is a new iteration of the performance Breath (Atem) (2019). Baydu’s performance unfolded behind a small glass partition that faces the foyer of Arter, secluded from the world outside the museum, specifically from Dolapdere, a neighborhood whose gentrification has been accelerated by the institution’s presence. Over the course of the first twenty days of the exhibition, the artist breathed into a massive translucent vinyl balloon during Arter’s visiting hours until the balloon stuffed the entire room. Eventually, the artist’s breath displaced her body, forcing her out of the space. For the rest of the exhibition’s duration, her breath remained, captured in the balloon, in the gallery, prompting questions about Arter and art museums at large: do such institutions leave room for their neighboring communities to breathe, or do they absorb all the oxygen until everyone around them vanishes into thin air?

Launched in 2010 as a “space for art” by the Vehbi Koç Foundation, a nonprofit organization funded by Turkey’s largest conglomerate, Arter began operating as a cultural institution that hosts exhibitions, events, and public programming in Istanbul. The main location of the museum was originally the historical building of Meymaret Han on İstiklal Avenue. Plans to expand the museum into a larger complex on a site in Dolapdere were initiated in 2015. The foundation’s board of directors, comprised mainly of billionaire Koç family members, selected the London–based Grimshaw Architects to design a sizeable, new multipurpose museum. Across its six floors and approximately 18,000 square meters of space, the new building contains larger exhibition areas for the foundation’s private collection, alongside performance venues, lecture halls, and social spaces, including a bistro and a bookshop.

Dolapdere is a historic yet underfunded quarter of the central Beyoğlu district. Located a fifteen-minute walk from the central Taksim Square, the neighborhood has been home to many minority groups, including Armenian, Greek, and Jewish communities in the early twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Istanbul pogrom of 1955, which targeted the dispossession of non-Muslim communities, the ethnic and religious makeup of the neighborhood drastically changed, with Armenian, Greek, and Jewish minorities abandoning their damaged apartments and stores. In their place, Romani communities began to settle, followed by a wave of internal migration from rural Anatolia that ushered in Turkish and Kurdish immigrants who were looking for low-income housing in the city. More recently, Syrian refugees took up residence, just as Dolapdere was becoming a hub of the cosmopolitan working class. Yet, much like Tarlabaşı, another neighborhood in the Beyoğlu district that endured notorious gentrification, Dolapdere’s proximity to the city’s hotspots, alongside working-class residents who lack the means to combat the mega-developers, has rendered the neighborhood defenseless against urban renewal processes.

Situated on Irmak Avenue in the heart of Dolapdere, Arter reopened in 2019 as a museum whose galleries are hardly different from a traditional white cube. Set along a boulevard lined with other art galleries, such as Dirimart, and a campus of my own alma mater, Istanbul Bilgi University—another cultural institution complicit in the gentrification of the area—Arter’s building made the urban transformation of the neighborhood all the more palpable. Three-dimensional geometric panels, which carry the visual motifs of mosaic tiles and ceramics of the Ottoman Empire, envelop the facades of the museum and starkly contrast with the dilapidated houses of the working-class residents in the surrounding area. Although the architects constructed large windows that open up to the neighborhood with the hope that it would “connect the gallery to the city” and make “the building welcoming and accessible to all,” that idealistic undertaking is yet to be realized.1 The museum’s presence has instead amplified the top-down urban renewal in the area, causing affordable housing to evaporate and slowly forcing out many vulnerable populations.

Far from a unique case, however, Arter’s role in the ongoing transformation of Dolapdere is deeply entangled in the privatization of the cultural sphere in Turkey. While the country has historically lacked strong public infrastructure for the arts, the neoliberal economic policies embraced under Turgut Özal’s conservative government in the 1980s further decreased state funding for the arts and incentivized private investment. This situation has been exacerbated since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s party AKP took power in 2002. After a decade of seemingly moderate liberal policies around urban cultural politics, Erdoğan’s government has opted toward increasingly despotic modes of governance following the Gezi Park protests in 2013, which saw millions of people contest oppressive measures around urban redevelopment, democratic rights, and civil liberties in Turkey. Writing about this time, art historians Ayşe Erek and Ayşe Köksal observe that “this latest stage has been characterized by a highly authoritarian form of neoliberalism in which the government acts more as a patron and promoter of an aggressive urban entrepreneurialism supported by the local bourgeoisie than as a regulator.”2 Today, it’s safe to assume that the majority of cultural institutions and events—museums, galleries, biennales, and art fairs—are funded by high-profile families and corporations in Turkey, including Koç Holding, Eczacıbaşı Group, Sabancı Holding, and Borusan Holding.

Since the art world in Turkey is at the whim of such wealthy stakeholders, acquiring an institutional platform is a threshold that minoritarian artists are not always able to cross. That’s why Loving You Is So Hard!, curated by Selen Ansen, offers a fruitful stage for Mehtap Baydu, whose works have much to offer about the shifting landscape of bodies, identities, and places, but have been largely underrepresented in institutions in Turkey until now. Baydu’s exhibition is the latest in a series of solo exhibitions at Arter dedicated to artists whose works have likewise been informed by minoritarian experiences, including the Istanbul–based Armenian–Greek artist Hera Büyüktaşçıyan, whose exhibition Phantom Quartet coincided with Baydu’s. In group exhibitions, the museum has also included the work of the formerly incarcerated Kurdish artist Fatoş İrwen, whose practice centers Kurdish identity, memory, and resistance. With a series of body-oriented works, Baydu’s practice adds a new layer to the roster, contesting who can be visible if the institution makes room for them.

In her book The Metabolic Museum, Clémentine Deliss notes that “if the museum is to provide its collections—and by extension artworks—with the oxygen necessary for their renewed emission and reception, it needs to take on the complexities of cognitive and emotional responses generated within its walls, opening up histories and their complaints to operations of curative inquiry.”3 The curatorial initiative to display these artists seems to suggest that Arter has made a similar move in providing a space for dissident art and culture to flourish, at least within the limits of Erdoğan’s repressive regime. Yet, this does not negate the fact that Arter’s funding comes from the wealthiest family in Turkey, whose inconspicuous opposition to the current government and, more ominously, its direct ties to the arms manufacturing sector have often drawn public scrutiny. Nor does it justify the institution’s participation in Dolapdere’s gentrification. By inviting these artists into the museum to negotiate histories that would otherwise remain untold, Arter has only recently begun to confront itself, calling into question its ongoing effects on the bodies, communities, and urban spaces that surround it.

It seems appropriate, then, that Loving You Is So Hard! conjures notions of embodiment, space, and volume. Baydu has been deeply invested in the body and its materiality throughout her career, which spans two decades. Born in Bingöl, Turkey, in 1972, Baydu was trained as a sculptor, receiving a BFA from Hacettepe University in Ankara and an MFA-equivalent degree at the Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany. Through her focus on the body as a site of social, cultural, and political shifts, her artistic practice extends beyond sculpture to engage a wide array of media, including performance, video, and photography. The exhibition at Arter remains committed to highlighting the range of Baydu’s multidisciplinary practice, forging a dialogue between her earlier and more recent works.

A towering obelisk assembled from dozens of plaster casts of human body parts looms large when one steps into the exhibition. The fragmented pieces raise a vertical spine and culminate in a colossal structure in the middle of the gallery, resembling at once a pile of bone fragments and an Ancient Greek column. Titled Wirbelsäule (2026), which means “spinal column” in German, the artist created this large-scale sculptural installation specifically for the exhibition, using plaster casts of her own head, torso, arms, breasts, and shoulders. With its soaring yet fragile composition, the spinal structure appears both fixed in place and loose enough to break into bits and pieces at any moment. This ambivalent tension between the firmness and fragility of the spine seems pertinent: Wirbelsäule evokes more than just a living and breathing architectural monument standing proudly inside the gallery. The use of body parts in lieu of bricks, stones, or concrete blocks unearths the conditions of those whose embodied labor is exploited in the building of grandiose structures. By placing one dismembered corporeal unit onto another, Baydu’s installation transforms an otherwise solid monument into one of ephemeral carcasses, replete with the fleeting remainders of human materiality.

Facing Wirbelsäule across the room are the multimedia works Distortion (2025–2026) and Exchanging Skin with a Tree (2025–2026), both of which the artist realized during a residency at The Watermill Center on the eastern end of Long Island, New York. In the panoramic video performance Distortion, the artist appears from behind in an outdoor setting, with her arms stretched laterally and making circular motions that invoke a spinal movement. A sharp noise with a pulsating rhythm, possibly mingling with the hums of the surrounding flora and fauna, teems from speakers into the gallery, creating an atmosphere that is both welcoming and unsettling. The more Baydu twists and turns her arms, the more her spine blends in with the woods. The sculptural installation Exchanging Skin with a Tree is a meditation on the kinship between the human and nonhuman world, explored through a comparison of the textures of human skins and trees. Using bronze casts and porcelain powder, the artist gives a new silhouette to a tree branch, pairing it with tiny casts made from her own body, each piece suggesting a fallen leaf. In an ensemble that conjures a forlorn tree, Baydu exposes the interconnected nature of seemingly different ontological entities and the urgency of practicing care for one another. Shown in tandem with Wirbelsäule, these works gesture toward a new level of complexity in the artist’s career that opens up the body into different forms, materials, and environments.

Near these installations is a more intimate conversation that unfolds between two skin-related works. The multimedia installation Preparing for the Day (2018) displays a human-sized paper skin resting on a chair, as if it were a garment thrown off after a long day. In the eponymous video that plays behind it, Baydu irons out the wrinkly edges of that same skin, making it ready to be worn in public. As a work that treats one’s own skin as a malleable surface to be smoothened, flattened, or carefully put on, it creates a visual dialogue with the installation The Distance Between Me and Everything Else (A Body in Glass) (2025). Baydu created this work by casting her body in silicone reproduction and suspending the resultant skin in the air like drying laundry. After remaining in the cast for hours, which allowed the material to settle into the shapes and contours of the artist’s body, she released herself from this outer layer.

Considering the shedding of skin in the process of its making, The Distance Between Me and Everything Else (A Body in Glass) stages a sense of self that is crystallized in a temporality other than one’s own. This gesture evokes an affective register of migration, of not feeling at home in one’s own skin. Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed writes that migration can entail “a spatial reconfiguration of an embodied self: a transformation in the very skin through which the body is embodied.”4 What Baydu produces here strikes a chord: a body that exceeds a version of itself that remained in the past. Unlike the paper skin whose edges could be patched to fit into any shape, here is a skin with the utmost rigidity: a shell too tight that the subject it enfolds needs to break free from it.

As much as the curation of these newer works are handled with care, the attention paid to her earlier works with more political overtones is less convincing. The “Time Wall” of the exhibition, a name designated by the curator, is the merger of two large panels painted in navy blue, displaying Baydu’s sculpted casts and performance ephemera such as garments, photographs, and video documentations from 2007 to the present. From sculptures that feature the artist’s signature ponytail to the more performative photographic works such as Osman (2010), in which Baydu assumes the identity of a fictional masculine character who immigrates from Turkey to Germany, this section presents a range of the artist’s works in an almost free-form manner, as if one is meandering inside a vintage boutique, coming across a series of random objects, portraits, and antique figurines. Even her well-known work Self-Portrait: Wrapping in a Character (2015–2017)—a miniature sculpture series that references Baydu’s eponymous performance where she wore the everyday attires of women from different social backgrounds—is swallowed here by the deep blue shades of the wall and the crowded layout. Despite a name that suggests otherwise, this section lacks the adequate time to contextualize Baydu’s works that engage with sensitive political issues in Turkey and beyond.

The final section of the exhibition is a narrow room with a small circular window that offers another view of the glass partition where Baydu performed Breath (Atem). During the performance, however, this room was closed to visitors—it was only accessible after Baydu had finished inflating the balloon during the exhibition’s first three weeks. This is a questionable curatorial gesture, given that the room includes perhaps the two most explicitly political works in the gallery. Greeting visitors at the door is UP IN THE AIR! (2026), a sculpture of the artist’s left arm with a clenched fist that invokes an act of resistance. Adjacent is a video performance titled Mehtap (2011), in which the artist utters her name coupled with different and contrasting identities such as “Mehtap the villager, Mehtap the urbanite, Mehtap the Kurd, Mehtap the Turk.” In her book Poetics of the Flesh, Mayra Rivera notes that “the distinctions between cultural and material dimensions of corporeality are established discursively and they have material consequences. Between body and flesh there are always words.”5 Similarly, the identities that Baydu assumes in this video reveal the discursive power of such categories as much as their elusive nature in shaping one’s embodied self.

While some words slip, as they do in Baydu’s video performance, others stick around to wound. Last June, Rahmi Koç, the reigning patriarch of the Koç family, made a racist and sexist joke about Kurdish women during the launch of a private hospital modelled after the US healthcare system in İzmir, funded by his own conglomerate.6 Drawing immediate public backlash and an ex officio investigation by the İzmir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, the incident unmasked the true face of a billionaire whose family’s philanthropic foundation platforms artists of Kurdish heritage at Arter. Although Koç eventually apologized, stating that he meant no harm, his distasteful remarks rendered visible the ongoing denigration of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies in contemporary Turkey. Therefore, the inaccessibility of a work like Mehtap, even for a short period, is a missed opportunity. The framing of this section indicates that a conscious effort has been made to uncouple the political language of these works from the artist’s live performance. Combined with the timid design of the “Time Wall,” the exhibition shies away from making an overt political statement when doing so seems all the more urgent in the current climate.

Despite these curatorial limitations, Breath (Atem) delivers the political stakes of Baydu’s practice. As writer and curator Sandeep Sodhi similarly observes in the catalogue, Baydu’s performance is “not only a demonstration of the permeability between the body and the material but also of the social dimension of space: who is allowed to breathe, who remains shut out?”7 Originally, the artist performed this work in 2019 as part of the fourth Berliner Herbstsalon organized by the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, whose curatorial theme “De-Heimatize It!” contested notions of homeland, identity, and belonging. The venue of the performance was the storefront window of Scotty e.V., an artist-run space located in Kreuzberg, a gentrified district of Berlin that has long been populated with immigrant and working-class communities. The shop window, where Baydu breathed into a balloon and filled it within a couple of weeks, is situated within a strip of cafés, restaurants, bars, and galleries. While rubbing shoulders with different businesses may be an uneventful act elsewhere, in the urban fabric of Kreuzberg it is rife with anxieties around how social life is affected by migration and gentrification. By occupying the entire storefront with her breath, Baydu’s performance disclosed that the spaces to breathe for immigrant residents and business owners in the neighborhood are dwindling at an accelerated pace.

At Arter, the dramaturgy of this performance was slightly changed. The same act took place inside a glass room near her exhibition, however, instead of facing the street, Baydu stood behind a glass partition that opened up to the sanitized interiors of the museum. Unlike the performance’s first staging, where the audience could be anyone passing by on the street in Kreuzberg, at Arter only museum visitors—presumably people with access to a certain degree of financial and cultural capital—could witness the live event as it unfolded. In this altered version, even though the location and the audience were different, the performance’s constraint remained the same. Reenacting this performance under the roof of a cultural institution that has changed the air of its own neighborhood, Breath (Atem) mediated the tension between those who are able to remain in the urban cosmology of Istanbul, and those who are squeezed out.

In the shifting atmosphere of Dolapdere, everyday encounters between working-class residents and Arter’s visitors are becoming increasingly rare. The institution even discourages the simple act of walking from Taksim Square to the street where the museum is located. Arter runs free shuttle services that operate regularly for its visitors, thereby foreclosing any contact with people living in the area. For these two seemingly disparate crowds—one assumed to be a sophisticated group of cultural workers and art enthusiasts, the other impoverished, racialized, and criminalized minorities—breathing the same air seems to be an issue that the institution has failed to address. Breath (Atem), in contrast, opens up Arter to its peripheries, showing how its elevated building has altered the texture of the neighborhood—not in a way that would benefit the poverty-ridden communities, but rather in service of the profit-oriented corporate elite. As Baydu’s balloon expanded and became more visible with every breath, so too did the very contradiction that lies at the heart of Arter: a “space for art” that takes up the space from the bodies around it. Under the current regime driven by an appetite for corporate-led gentrification, Baydu’s performance reveals that, until that balloon pops, we are all gasping for air.

1 “Arter museum opens in Istanbul,” Grimshaw, September 16, 2019, https://grimshaw.global/news/articles/archive/arter-museum-opens-in-istanbul/.

2 Ayşe Erek and Ayşe Köksal, “Relocating the Arts in the New Istanbul: Urban Imaginary as a Contested Zone,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 30, no. 4 (2014): 303.

3 Clémentine Deliss, The Metabolic Museum (Hatje Cantz, 2020), 106.

4 Sara Ahmed, “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (1999): 342.

5 Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh (Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

6 Gashtyar Akram, “Turkish billionaire’s joke about Kurdish woman sparks backlash,” The New Region, June 6, 2026, https://thenewregion.com/posts/5566/turkish-billionaire-s-joke-about-kurdish-woman-sparks-backlash.   

7 Sandeep Sodhi, “When the Peacock Dances Before the Rain,” Loving You Is So Hard! [exhibition catalogue], edited by Selen Ansen and Süreyyya Evren (Arter, 2026), 44.

Oğuz Kayır is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan whose research explores how contemporary artists from Turkey engage with embodiment in the wake of state-sanctioned violence and authoritarianism. His writings have appeared in Art History, MIRAJ, and Journal of Visual Culture. 

Images of Breath (Atem) performed at Arter: Fırat Rüzgar

Installation images of Loving You Is So Hard!: Photos: Kayhan Kaygusuz