İrem Günaydın (b. 1989, Istanbul) is an artist and a suffix. She is not within time nor entirely beyond.
My artistic practice is primarily organized around the act of writing. Drawing inspiration from art history, literature, and philosophy, my work deconstructs historiography through minor narratives and elements of contemporary popular media. My long-standing research on the relationship between artist and audience, process and form, negative space and its boundaries, context, and canon, as well as figure and background, questions around the conditions of possibility of art-making, and the circulation of forms and their meaning, serve as tools to investigate forgotten, neglected, suppressed, and overlooked stories that are consumed, and erased by a triumphant narrative. Similar to Perseus, who looked at Medusa indirectly—the snake-haired creature that petrified onlookers with her gaze—I strive in my practice to explore history indirectly, seeking any "truth" through parergon and minor perspectives.
Irem is a four-vertex quantity or expression in a vast matrix with rows and columns processed with a vaguely hidden logic. She—I mean, I—and the negative space dance with one another. I attribute an extension, specifically a suffix, to the matrix on which I dance. Yet the exteriority of this matrix pushes the field's boundary and interferes with the internal organization. This means that I, as an artist, as a suffix, try to fold the triumphant narrative from the outside in, using the margins to destabilize the balance of the center. In my practice, I continue to write, think through writing, and investigate by tearing holes into the tightly knit textures of history and the surface of my identity as an artist.