:MENTALKLINIK

With this new body of work and micro-climates, the artist duo (hailing from Istanbul and based in Brussels) introduce a thought-provoking inquiry into the 21st century development of artistic practices, and the current scope of human life from which it originates. Orchestrating the physical exhibition space as a virtual render, the works on show perform a dense scala of online-offline glitches, confusions and tensions to excavate how life, art and entertainment exponentially morph into each other. Once separate, these arena’s of life are now tangled into an opaque bubble keeping humans occupied without pause. Allround and always, its mechanisms are downplaying our bodies into passive oblivion whilst keeping our minds non-stop connected to the virtual neo-capitalist vortex. Productivity, even when doing nothing, as an all-consuming religion. An out-of-body experience.

With their distinct flair for glamour, fetish, slickness and sensuality, :mentalKLINIK will populate the gallery space with ghostly apparitions. Metal truss sculptures reminiscent of concert or club nights creeping through the space like anthropomorphic creatures; haunting hollow human shapes seated, reclined or leaning, but always indifferent to our presence. Subverting the optimist ideology of technological growth, the artists are seeking to provoke a certain unease. Reckoning with the new reality that we’re building, they are visualising a society motored by perpetual desire, notwithstanding the imminent decline of human agency. A world inhabited by slaves to a coded set of mutated instincts.

A horizon for the new era - as phrased by the artists themselves - will demarcate this inert environment. It is made up of a series of wet and fake paintings, depicting abstract colour blocks, simultaneously echoing Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism; a limbo between mind and body. :mentalKLINIK’s recurring palette of fuschia pinks, deep blacks, nocturnal blues and shimmering metallics gestures both the artists’ hands and technologic production processes. Together with the anatomic ‘errors’ characterising the ghostly protagonists, they question (artistic) self-preservation and authenticity amidst the paradigm shift of technological advancement and AI.

What happens when art originates from a linguistic formula? Who is servicing who and how are we supposed to position ourselves within this subversion? Are we sure about the limitlessness of our growth? Visitors will encounter their hyper-fragmented reflections in the various mirrored surfaces that punctuate the exhibition. There is no escape, Generated Dreams is an attempted reality-check from a dissonant fever dream we can’t step out from.

Evelyn Simons