Fakewhale in Dialogue with :mentalKLINIK

:mentalKLINIK’s practice unfolds like a prismatic, elusive entity, merging glamour with unease, surface gloss with hidden political strategies. A conceptual disco ball that refracts the codes of contemporary life, transforming installations, objects, and environments into fields of emotional tension, dark irony, and aesthetic seduction. Fakewhale had the opportunity to speak with Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir, the duo behind this hyperstimulated universe, to explore the origins of their visual language, the sociopolitical implications of their work, and the ongoing experimentation that fuels their research.

Fakewhale:Your work often presents a sleek, glamorous aesthetic, yet just beneath the surface, there’s a lingering sense of discomfort, ambiguity, or tension. How do you construct this apparent duality between attraction and repulsion, and what kind of perceptual shift are you hoping to trigger in the viewer?

:mentalKLINIK: We might say our work is repulsively attractive. From the beginning, we have thought beyond binary regimes—beauty and ugliness, good and bad, attraction and repulsion. These oppositions no longer explain the world we live in. Reality today is woven from contradictory forces that coexist and contaminate one another. We inhabit a sophisticated, opaque structure where pleasure and violence share the same code under soft power. Our oxymoronic approach is a tool to navigate that opacity.
Each work seduces to expose; every shimmer conceals a fault line as in our Painting Without Paint series Faker (2009–ongoing) the canvas becomes glass, functioning like a reflective screen. Painting migrates from surface to environment: brushstrokes dissolve into industrial layers, light acts as pigment, and transparency becomes deceit. Each piece is a truth test of vision—where reflection exposes what visibility conceals.
We live under a new kind of light—produced by invisible powers: algorithms, data flows, and surveillance technologies masked as transparency. The clarity of this world hides its own opacity. Glowing interfaces and seamless screens operate as cosmetic layers over deep excavation sites where our gestures, emotions, and desires are mined. We turn this smooth surface of hyper-capitalism into an instrument of friction. This is the affective texture of our time: frictionless interfaces, emotional speed and overstimulated calm. (…)

You frequently use visual devices like neon, mirror balls, slogans, confetti, and strobe lights, suggesting a nocturnal, hyperreal, almost post-human universe. How does your visual world relate to party culture and media performance, and what political meanings are embedded in that dimension?

As an artist duo, we don’t work on subjects; we work on contemporaneity itself, which we articulate as the hyper-now—not just simultaneity, but the total collapse of distance between the physical and the virtual, the immediate and the mediated. In this condition, entertainment becomes the dominant operating system of our time—an ideology disguised as pleasure, an occupation rather than a recreation.

In our Paradise on Sale, 2023 exhibition at Dirimart, we staged the celebration of the end of utopia, inviting the audience as its accomplices. The entire installation was suspended from an entertainment truss, hovering above a floor carpeted with mirrored confetti—an artificial sky over a synthetic ground. Strobe lights, champagne scent, and reflective sculptures formed a choreography of pleasure exposing its own exhaustion. Animated by the the MetaHuman Frenemy (2022) and the surveillance owl Cute Spy (2023), the space enacted the logic of the hyper-now, where desire and surveillance operate as one continuous network. Paradise on Sale reflected not paradise but its burnout: an aesthetic of overexposure where pleasure turns anesthetic.(…)

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