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. Our installations simulate this rhythm, not to condemn it but to make it suspicious.
Jack Halberstam describes :mentalKLINIK’s approach as counter-co-operators—we collaborate with the system precisely to expose its violence. Each exhibition becomes a seductive environment that performs complicity until it cracks. If awakening occurs, the exhibition turns into a torture house—an exquisite chamber where seduction starts to hurt.
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.
Our practice explores how individuals are manipulated through hypnotic atmospheres and the endless flow of images and words circulating in digital networks. Behind every seductive surface lies another, more anxious reality. By re-appropriating the glamorous language of nightlife and media—neon, slogans, mirror balls, confetti—we construct environments of sensory hyperstimulation. The disco ball becomes a metaphor for the now: dazzling, fragmented, endlessly spinning around its own reflection. Within this loop, the aesthetic of joy oversaturates until it dissolves into fatigue—where pleasure no longer liberates but absorbs.
The concept of “falsification” runs through much of your work, between real and fake, authentic and artificial. How do you actively engage with these ambiguous codes, and to what extent is illusion a material you manipulate, just like light or metal?
“How can art lie when reality is not true enough?”—this question from our Truish, 2017 exhibition at Gallery Isabelle still defines the axis of our work. We live in an age where truth has lost its texture, where facts arrive polished, optimized, and already exhausted. Manipulation has become the native language of the hyper-now. Reality today behaves like a shell—its surface stable, its content constantly mutating. Politics today performs the role that art once held: fabricating affect, spectacle, and belief. What we call reality is a phantasm—over-authored, endlessly recycled. The fake is not a copy but an upgraded real—with better lighting, smoother edges, and an infinite refresh rate. The digital threshold is no longer a question but a fact. As the last biological generation, the brain now operates through AI—entangled with biotech, neuroscience, and body technologies. The self no longer seeks the world but scans itself, compulsively scrolling its own reflection. Superficiality is not failure but necessity—the profile as survival kit, the body reformatted into an interface.
Our 2025 exhibition, Lunatic Poets at Pilevneli, illusion operates as architecture—an environment scripted from algorithmic collapse. The work builds a self-reflective system where digital humans perform emotions that no longer belong entirely to them—fear, fatigue, desire—each calibrated through data memory. Every sequence acts like a predictive mirror: it doesn’t reflect the viewer but anticipates them, returning an image slightly ahead of the present. Here, illusion no longer disguises reality; it replaces it. Lunatic Poets is not about artificial intelligence but about intelligence that has already become artificial—ours. The exhibition reveals how we inhabit simulation not as fiction but as a routine condition: gestures optimized, feelings pre-rendered, perception rehearsed. What we call illusion is no longer false—it’s the truest mirror of the now, where reality performs itself until it disappears.
Your practice is described as an “open laboratory” where roles and processes are constantly questioned. How does this methodology take shape in your daily work? Are there moments of friction or creative crisis within your collaborative dialogue?
We are inseparable, 24/7. :mentalKLINIK was never built on sameness but on a charged resonance — a living field of distinct minds and methods — a system of tension. The name itself carries a contradiction: mental and klinik — speculation and precision, imagination and procedure. From the beginning, we’ve worked beyond binary regimes, where difference becomes the driving force.
“mental” refers to the mind — the speculative; “KLINIK” to practice — between them runs the current that keeps the work alive. :mentalKLINIK emerged from this friction — two bodies generating a third persona that thinks, feels, and acts beyond us. Neither Yasemin nor Birol, yet more.
Some of our works embody this state like portraits of :mentalKLINIK itself: Double Cherry (2011) — two bodies, one stem, sharing a single pulse. Another Love 2019 — two bulbs breathing in asymmetrical rhythms. FrenchKiss 2013 — the silent language of saliva, a sensual communication between brass lungs. Together they articulate what our practice stands for: a union that generates excess, where two become a third — neither one nor the other, but something dangerously alive. Art, for us, remains the only non-utilitarian playground — and we are its spoilers.
In projects like Bitter Medicine #02 or Hypermoody, there’s a clear reflection on dissonant emotional states, often contrasted by the slick, polished formal language of the work. How do you approach the notion of emotion within an aesthetic that sometimes feels robotic or anti-emotional?
We approach emotion as a system rather than a state — a programmed condition circulating through the same networks that regulate visibility, desire, and time. In this sense, emotion today is infrastructural: distributed, formatted, and monetized before it is even felt. Our work doesn’t express emotion; it constructs the circumstances that produce it.
The 2020 exhibition Bitter Medicine #02 at Borusan Contemporary was a revisited version of one of our installations, reactivated under pandemic conditions when the museum was closed. We created a hybrid system: eight hacked robotic vacuums stripped of their dust bins, scattering glitter instead of collecting dust. Their mechanical task turned into a continuous broadcast, a painting in motion streamed 24/7 online. The artwork became both performance and media, transforming the museum into a transmitter rather than a destination.
What began as automation acquired a strange tenderness. The robots, deprived of function, kept moving in vain — poetic errors trapped in a feedback loop. They appeared clumsy, adorable, yet unsettling, like agents of a system that monitors even as it malfunctions. This gesture reflected our fascination with machines that mimic emotion while exposing our own programmed responses to them.
Our aesthetic is not about erasing feeling but about tracing how it mutates within digital circulation. We choreograph emotion as a shared algorithmic experience — where empathy, surveillance, and spectacle converge into a single operating field.
Over the years, you’ve chosen provocative and sometimes ironic titles like That’s Fucking Awesome or 83% Satisfaction Guaranteed. What role does language play in your work, and how does it connect to your visual strategies?
The oxymoron is the core of our thinking. It binds contradictions that define our time— playful yet violent, seductive yet abrasive. Our practice operates within this tension, using collision as structure and shamelessly setting back to back the legacies of conceptual art and minimalism with the vocabulary of pop and entertainment against the excess of entertainment to expose the illusions of happiness and success circulating through capitalist culture. The oxymoron becomes our instrument: a way to sculpt contradiction until it becomes visible, audible, and alive.
We use words as sculptural materials, emotional algorithms that perform rather than describe. Titles like That’s Fucking Awesome or 83% Satisfaction Guaranteed sound cheerful but carry a sense of unease. They mimic the syntax of advertising, compressing emotion into code. This practice evolved into what we call Contempoetry — the poetry of the hyper-now, written in the language of networks, politics, and marketing.
From this came Lunatic Poems, a long-term writing system that later became the backbone of Lunatic Poets. These poems are not narratives but residues — affective fragments, algorithmic prayers, emotional spam. They loop between sincerity and parody, truth and simulation. Here, poetry behaves like data: endlessly circulating, contagious, and unstable — the perfect oxymoron of our age.
Time seems to be a crucial element in many of your pieces, some installations are immersive and time-based, almost like sensory choreographies. How do you think about time in relation to the space of the artwork? Is it a narrative tool, a perceptual device, or a political element?
Time has always been our raw material. From aorist present to the hyper-now, our works trace how time has mutated from duration into performance. We’ve moved from the modernist “time of becoming” to a condition where time no longer flows—it loops, vibrates, glitches. It is produced, not lived.
Every Now (2025), a clock sculpture, a clock sculpture, embodies this shift as a hyper-sensual manifestation of time—a clock that refuses to behave. Two intersecting faces measure the fever of the present: one for hours, one for minutes, joined by an elongated second hand that slips beyond its boundaries, as if escaping chronology itself. Each hand moves on its own rhythm—accelerating, hesitating, reversing—while polyphonic alerts infiltrate the space like emotional data streams. Time here is not a neutral measure but a choreography of attention.
This perverse dramaturgy of time runs through our practice. In Magmaonthemountain at İstanbul Modern, a durational dinner for fifty guests, each course was timed like a musical score; Terribly Jolly suspended euphoria at its climax during a 30-minute “morning nightclub”; FRESHCUT at MAK Vienna stretched perception with scent and delay, turning duration into hallucination. Even our Table Talks were precisely 53 or 47 minutes—structured to make dialogue itself a timed performance.
Across these works, time becomes pressure rather than passage. Openings burn like clubs for 46 minutes, collapsing the social ritual into a single surge of intensity. From TagCloud (2008) to Subscriber Subjects, we have explored this oxymoronic temporality—frozen yet accelerated, real yet fabricated.
Time is not duration — it’s pressure. We choreograph the sensation of being trapped in the now. Our environments loop, shimmer, accelerate, and collapse. They simulate the temporal texture of contemporary life — endless refresh, no pause. Time becomes political when it dictates attention. The viewer’s body becomes the metronome. Every now we build measures not time but desire—the compulsion to stay connected, updated, awake.
Your works often resist categorization, objects, installations, environments, experiences. What is your relationship with the idea of a “finished form”? Is there a constant tension between the open-ended project and the closed, self-contained artwork?
We don’t believe in finished forms, because we don’t live in finished realities. The world has become too complex for one discipline, one medium, or one conclusion to contain it. Categorisation belonged to the 20th century — a time when knowledge could still be segmented, labelled, and archived.
The 21st century is about communication, broadcasting, and sharing. We are interwoven with systems of data, emotion, and visibility. Openness has become the default condition, and invisibility the new form of dissent — to be unseen is to be suspect. Within this regime of constant exposure, stability is impossible; form itself has become performative.
We were born analog, living digital, and dreaming in both. Our works inhabit that in-between condition — fluid, hybrid, non-linear. A piece may start as a sculpture, become a performance, and end as an atmosphere. We don’t produce objects; we generate conditions — temporary, unstable architectures that think, breathe, and mutate with their time.
You’ve worked and exhibited in a wide range of cultural contexts, from Istanbul to Brussels, the U.S. to Vienna. How does context influence the conception or presentation of your work? Do you adapt to each environment, or do you maintain a radically autonomous position?
We don’t adapt to geography; we adapt to simultaneity. Context matters, but not as territory—as frequency. We are not interested in national or cultural frames but in the ideologies that move through them: the invisible infrastructures shaping how we feel, consume, and perform. Our work responds to this circulation, not to borders. We tune into the vibration of the hyper-now, where meaning, power, and desire synchronize globally. What drives us is not place but tempo—the unstable rhythm of the contemporary.
Looking ahead, what projects are currently occupying your focus? Are you exploring new formats, collaborations, or technologies that might further expand your visual vocabulary?
We’ve been expanding Lunatic Poets since its debut at Pilevneli in September 2025 — a meta-cinematic installation performed by our MetaHuman Ensemble. Built in Unreal Engine 5, it merges digital profiles embodied by motion-captured performers and scripted from our decade-long Lunatic Poems archive. The MetaHumans we created, from scratch and out of data-mud, are not replicas but synthetic presences — bodies without origin, carriers of emotional memory breathing through algorithms. The work unfolds across two realities, physical and virtual, where robotic sculptures, sound, and light act like a synchronized nervous system. Lunatic Poets draws from the figure of the meczup, the Anatolian archetype of divine mad & wise — one who speaks truth through delirium. Madness here becomes method, a way of sensing what reason can no longer hold.
The MetaHuman Ensemble continues as a growing constellation of digital beings — designed in Unreal Engine 5, embodied by real performers yet resembling no one. They carry our hyper-emotional archive of hesitation, repetition, and excess across installations and futures. The Ensemble lives inside the :mentalKLINIK dollhouse — a world where presence fractures, poetry becomes protocol, and bodies transform into profiles without originals.
In parallel, the Profile Series — life-size AI-generated sculptures such as Billie, Valentine, Blake, Mica, and Grey (since 2024) — extends this inquiry into the physical realm. Mounted on heavy-duty robotic pedestals programmed with internal behavioral protocols, these figures oscillate, rotate, and hesitate like exhausted performers caught between command and emotion. They embody our conviction that when the body stops functioning, it starts performing. Artificial yet affective, they reveal how sculpture today can breathe, misbehave, and malfunction as a post-body organism.
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Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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