Dirimart is pleased to announce If you wanna go outside, get inside, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt’s first exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Comprising six newly produced works spanning sculpture, performance, video, and installation, the exhibition examines how politically and socially unthinkable situations gradually become the new normal. The works focus on the blurring boundaries between public and private spaces as well as between inside and outside. Through their artistic practice, Günyol & Kunt enter into debates shaped by a context in which many systems we assume to be grounded in universal principles are being shaken on a global scale.
Long walks play a central role in Günyol & Kunt’s daily routines and their modes of artistic production. Transforming the streets of different cities into a working space, this practice allows the duo to explore the underlying, often subconscious seismic tensions that resonate through public space. Information absorbed from multiple media sources continually shapes our psyche and perceptions of what is considered normal, bizarre, absurd or punishable across both public and private spaces. While the artists themselves are subject to these conditions, they also maintain a position of observation, producing works with an acute awareness of this duality.
One of the works produced for the exhibition, The Dirty Work (2026), consists of sculptures developed in response to the German Chancellor’s appropriation of the expression die Drecksarbeit, or ‘the dirty work’, in June 2025, when discussing Israel’s attacks on Iran. Sculptural letters that transform into the image of military ammunition when rotated three hundred and sixty degrees render visible the violence embedded in political rhetoric that makes civilian casualties invisible. In The Opening in Mayfair (2026), a performance that takes as its starting point the London Underground announcement ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’, the artists highlight the open-ended nature of surveillance and espionage in the public realm. The work incorporates reports written during the exhibition opening by a detective – whose identity remains unknown, even to the artists. In doing so, Günyol and Kunt foreground the public nature of the gallery space and the increasing authoritarian pressures shaping this publicness within the global political climate.
I didn’t like these colours! (2026) is drawn from the colours encountered by politicians, intellectuals and journalists in Turkey, who have been subjected to and faced a cycle of unjust detention. The installation presents this journey’s colour palette, composed of hues digitally sampled by the artists from press images of police uniforms, police vehicles, detention centres, courthouse corridors, interrogation rooms, cell doors, and walls. In Surrounded (2026), these colours are layered with subtle shifts around a space equivalent in size to a single-occupancy prison cell in present-day Turkey, transforming it into a mural that constructs its own boundaries. Together, these works draw attention not only to th deprivation of individual freedoms caused by such detentions, but also to their capacity to distort one’s perception of time. As a symbol of this enforced and arbitrary isolation, (at) the same time (2026) comprises a series of self-portrait video works generated using the artists’ own heartbeats as reference points. Day by Day (2026), on the other hand, produced using the knitting technique known as ‘prison work’ – a form of handicraft made by prisoners with beads since the early twentieth century and now considered an important strand of folk art – will mark the passage of a full year upon its completion.
An Anecdote: The Other (2020), documenting a moment during a walk taken by the artists in a park in Delft, comprises one of several malfunctioning lamps to repeatedly transmit the phrase ‘Free Osman Kavala’ in Morse code, referring to the unjust eight-year imprisonment of a publisher, civil and cultural rights activist, and philanthropist Osman Kavala. Another earlier work included in the exhibition, Right (2015) is formed by graphically assembling the word ‘hak’ (‘right’), which appears thirty-six times in the Constitution of Turkey. Constantly renewing its relevance, the work underscores the fundamental responsibility of any constitution: to guarantee the protection of the rights and freedoms of all individuals.
If you wanna go outside, get inside by Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt will be on view at Dirimart London from 5 March to 11 April 2026.
