İrem Günaydın (b. 1989, Istanbul) is an artist and a suffix.
İrem Günaydın is an artist based in Istanbul. Her work unfolds through writing as a speculative and para-fictional tool, one that probes the conditions of artmaking by engaging with the edges of narrative, form, and institutional memory. Oscillating between textual and spatial gestures, she works across mediums to construct aesthetic infrastructures that investigate the discarded, the supplemental, the misfiled, the misread. She often begins with a letter, an archive, a myth, or a rumor and then folds it inward, reframing it as a conceptual score, a structural support, or a performative frame.
Günaydın treats the “parergon,” that which is considered outside, secondary, or ornamental, as central to her inquiry. Her practice insists on re-seeing the overlooked: a Medusa turned mold, a buried collection of flint and botanical remnants, a bastardized table, a studio that isn't hers. These are not metaphors but working sites. Through typographic displacements, architectural recodings, and narrative duplications, she examines how symbols, bodies, and materials circulate, shift, and collapse under the weight of contextual reassignment.
Her exhibitions act as spatial essays: the table, the column, the apple, the frame, and the bastard all become conceptual figures that carry histories, myths, and critical philosophy, only to be ruptured through careful misalignment. She constructs and disfigures objects in tandem, exposing their reliance on what is unseen: the labor of support, the background noise, the erased gesture. What is frame? What is work? Where does a figure end and ground begin? These are persistent coordinates in her practice.
The name she uses online, fourthisbullshit, comes from a phrase by Harald Szeemann in 1966: “The third time, one should stop. Because the fourth is Bullshit.” Günaydın adopts this not just as provocation, but as a position, a refusal of expected cycles, a commitment to entering from the wrong angle, and an insistence on the illegitimate, the extra, the too-much. Her work often stems from this “fourth gesture,” the one presumed unnecessary, excessive, or improper, and she turns that position into a method.
Deeply invested in the folds between high theory and pop ephemera, her works stage playful yet precise dialogues between Derridean structures, minor anecdotes, and cartoons that puncture representational logic. A message in a bottle may travel through a myth, a biennial, a film still, a bureaucratic form, or a dinner table, each becoming both delivery system and conceptual residue.
Günaydın’s work often exists in states of adjacency: script and sculpture, archive and excavation, mold and monument, figure and shadow. She performs with and through the gaps in knowledge systems, offering not closure, but carefully constructed disorientation. What remains after history, after art, after authorship is where her work begins.