Coming soon: Mehtap Baydu

The exhibition examines Baydu’s longstanding multimedia and performance practice, through which she deals with culturally determined images of gender roles and how they change over time. Baydu deliberately oversteps boundaries, takes on so-called “male roles,” extends “female roles,” and performs the gaze of the other on the self. She is interested in the significance of various objects and symbols, and with their narratives in various cultural spheres—such as the dowry tradition in Turkish and Kurdish contexts, sayings, religious symbols, or everyday activities. One recurring element is a reference to rituals that have emerged in female communities—rituals of trust, hope, and silence.

Baydu’s performances open up spaces in which intimate memories and symbolic actions intertwine. In these poetic choreographies she addresses questions of visibility, vulnerability, and solidarity—above and beyond national or cultural categorizations. Her own body is frequently the starting point for the disclosure and deconstruction of socio-politically informed expectations on bodies read as female.

Baydu uses disguise—sometimes as a man, sometimes as a mythological figure—or the draping of her body with traditional objects as a means of self-empowerment. In the exhibition Let Your Rain Fall (Kendi Yağmurunu Yağdırmak) she assembles recent and earlier works into an experience that consciously pushes the boundaries of prescribed narratives. Rather than delivering clear answers, her works take a poetic and playful approach to the sensitive politics around the female body, questions of migration and autobiographical contextualization, and traditional roles within conservative social and political systems. Her works are conceived as quiet but powerful homages to all the desires that are borne and shared despite often being unspoken.

Baydu was an in-house artist at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden from 2021 to 2023. The concept of the in-house artist comes from the idea of building up long-term relationships with artists so as to involve them in institutional processes. Baydu’s years here saw a conceptual collaboration on content, lectures, and performances. As in-house artist, she regularly engaged with the context of Baden-Baden, its population, resident communities, and public space.

About Mehtap Baydu

Mehtap Baydu is a performance and installation artist. She concentrates on gender roles and sensitive religious and political issues in multicultural contexts. She challenges the audience of her performances with symbolic objects and situations. Baydu studied sculpture at Hacettepe University and the Kunsthochschule Kassel. She has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Robert Wilson Foundation and the Tarabya Cultural Academy, and the Art Prize of the Städtische Galerie Nordhorn in 2021. Her work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, such as Cuma, at Edition Block, Berlin, in 2018. Baydu lives and works in Berlin.