Gallery Isabelle invites everyone to explore ARE YOU HUMAN ENOUGH, a solo exhibition by the artist duo :mentalKLINIK, which will remain open until 20 March 2026. The show unfolds as a provocative meditation on perception, identity, embodiment, and agency in an age of technological acceleration and visual saturation.
At the centre of the exhibition is Viola, a video work from the series Lunatic Poets, 2024. It features a MetaHuman figure created over four years through digital and embodied contributions: choreography, costume, and performance. Viola’s fragmented monologue, delivered in :mentalKLINIK’s signature contempoetry (a lexicon drawn from everyday language and clichés that reveal the hidden underside of contemporary society), loops between seduction and disturbance, raising pressing questions about what it means to be “human enough” in a moment when technological evolution often outpaces emotional and spiritual development.
The show also presents LIKEWISE (2025), a 360-degree installation of mirrored aluminium panels disrupted by hand-manipulated wet ink. These camouflaged, layered surfaces, printed with imagery of parrots, lobsters, manicured hands, and jewels, disorient and confound the gaze, dissolving the human figure into reflective pattern and aesthetic signal. This visual noise becomes a metaphor for a culture driven by hyper-visibility, algorithmic mediation, and compulsive accumulation.
ARE YOU HUMAN ENOUGH invites viewers into an unstable perceptual field where the line between analogue gesture and programmed process blurs. The mirrored environment, which continuously shifts between image and self-reflection, prompts introspection on attention, presence, and how agency persists when creation is partially entrusted to automated systems.
About the artists
:mentalKLINIK is a collaborative practice founded in 1998 by Yasemin Baydar (b. 1972, Istanbul) and Birol Demir (b. 1967, Ankara). Both artists studied fine art at the Mimar Sinan University (Istanbul).
Originally from Turkey and now based in Brussels, the duo’s work blends paradox, dark humour, and conceptual rigour. They explore how contemporary life is shaped by hyper-capitalism, technological systems, and the unseen forces that govern perception and behaviour. Their practice, which spans video, installation, sculpture, performance-inflected processes, and experimental installations, often engages with language, visual overload, and networked systems. The duo often question audiences about what is real, what is constructed, and how we navigate a world increasingly mediated by screens and data.
:mentalKLINIK’s works have been shown internationally in multiple solo and group exhibitions, including Glitter (solo) (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany, 2025); Spectres Of Future, Doel Festival (Doel, Belgium, 2023); Chroniques Biennale Of Digital Imagination 2022, After Party (Panorama Friche La Belle De Mai, Marseille, France); and Canal Connect_MAD MACHINE (Teatros del Canal, Madrid, Spain, 2021), among others.
To get more information about ARE YOU HUMAN ENOUGH, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
You might also be interested in attending You would come back there to see me again the following day by Michiko Tsuda.
