Dirimart London presents If you wanna go outside, get inside, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt’s first exhibition at the gallery’s London space, on view from 5 March to 11 April 2026.
Spanning sculpture, performance, video, and installation, the exhibition interrogates the gradual normalisation of political violence, surveillance, and the erosion of public and private boundaries. Through their artistic practice, Günyol & Kunt transform the streets of different cities into a field of investigation, exploring the underlying, often subconscious tensions embedded in public space. Their artistic analysis considers how contemporary culture’s constant media bombardment shapes our psyche and our perceptions of what is deemed ‘normal’ across public and private realms – conditions the artists simultaneously inhabit and observe, producing works with an acute awareness of this duality.
In The Opening in Mayfair (2026), the artists highlight the open-ended nature of surveillance and espionage in the public realm. A performance that takes its origins from the London Underground announcement ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’, the performance incorporates reports written during the exhibition opening by a detective whose identity remains unknown, even to the artists. The work foregrounds the public nature of the gallery space, alongside the increasing authoritarian pressures shaping this publicness within the global political climate.
A new sculptural work, The Dirty Work (2026), was developed in response to the German Chancellor’s use of the expression die Drecksarbeit (“the dirty work”) in June 2025, during discussions of Israel’s attacks on Iran. Comprising sculptural letters spelling Drecksarbeit, the work reveals its latent violence when rotated 360 degrees, transforming the text into the form of military ammunition and rendering visible the violence embedded in political rhetoric.
A group of works addressing unjust detention in Turkey includes I didn’t like these colours! (2026), drawn from the colours encountered by politicians, intellectuals, and journalists subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. The installation presents a palette sampled from press images of police uniforms, vehicles, detention centres, courthouse corridors, interrogation rooms, and prison cells.
In Surrounded (2026), these colours envelop a space equivalent in size to a single-occupancy prison cell in present-day Turkey, forming a mural that constructs its own boundaries. Together, these works address both the deprivation of individual freedoms and the distortion of time under conditions of enforced isolation.
This temporal dislocation is further explored in (at) the same time (2026), a series of self-portrait video works generated using the artists’ own heartbeats as reference points. Day by Day (2026), produced using the beaded crochet technique known as ‘prison work’ or hapishane işi, which derives its production practice from a lineage stretching back to Ottoman soldiers taken prisoner during World War I, will mark the passage of a full year upon its completion.
Drawing the exhibition to a close, An Anecdote: The Other (2020), features a malfunctioning lamp transmitting the phrase “Free Osman Kavala” in Morse code. This reflects the artist’s spontaneous response to the unjust imprisonment of the publisher, civil and cultural rights activist, and philanthropist Osman Kavala. Also on view is Right (2015), which graphically assembles the word hak (‘right’), appearing thirty-six times in the Constitution of Turkey, underscoring the fundamental responsibility of any constitution to protect the rights and freedoms of all individuals.
