Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan in “superanxiety”
By Matt A. Hanson
Installation view of CAN YILDIRIM and LALIN MERCAN’s "superanxiety" at Kiralik Depo, Istanbul, 2025. Courtesy the artists and Kiralik Depo.
superanxiety
Kiralık Depo
Istanbul
Jan 25–Mar 2, 2025
With ample sardonic humor, the installation-savvy artist duo Can Yıldırım and Lalin Mercan debuted an array of multimedia works at Istanbul’s artist-run Kiralık Depo. The exhibition deftly captured the sensory overload caused by today’s media saturation. Titled “superanxiety” (süperendişe in Turkish), it included drawings on paper, sculptures, and installations at the bunker-style, walk-in closet of an art space located in the Beyoğlu district. Surrounded by enviable residential properties in Turkey’s biggest city, the site’s grungy, claustrophobic nightmare was stressed with satirical abandon.
A maneki-neko cat positioned by Kiralık Depo’s only window to the outside promised fortune: striped with automotive paint and beckoning with its back turned to the window, the silver-coated brass sculpture tired cat (2025) denied any sense of asylum, either outside or inside the space. The low ceilings of Kiralık Depo became all the more stifling as the interior was upholstered with an industrial polyurethane used for luxury cars and warplanes, and the padded walls bore a pattern that resembled nuclear hazard symbols— simulating an over-bright seclusion room in an old psychiatric institution.
CAN YILDIRIM and LALIN MERCAN, tired cat, 2025, PLA, auto paint, color pencil, silver coated brass, 36 × 41 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artists and Kiralik Depo, Istanbul.
Speakers were installed throughout the anterior exhibition space, filling the room with an endless drone of generic audio said to relieve envy and rage. Engulfed by this continuous and paradoxically unnerving thrum, viewers came across a series of drawings that hung at eye level from casts of outstretched chicken feet coated with a metallic glaze. For this collaborative project, titled futuredays (2025), Yıldırım and Mercan used graphite, pencil, auto paint, and a heavy gel medium to create rough illustrations with contrasting green and red color schemes. These pictorial works adapted promotional adverts and other visual archives from the 1900 Paris Exposition, where futuristic visions were rife with oceanic and underground worlds before the advent of air travel, with military submarines and undersea colonies supposedly dominating the forthcoming millennium.
Reflecting these fantastical imaginings, the drawings depict men in winged contraptions stealing from eagles, as seen in shelter spear, egg hunt. Another image, aerial end milking, features armed zeppelins floating over battle-weary seas. These graphic works have an almost pointillist, unfinished aesthetic, and the emerald illustrations complemented the faded crimson etchings of toy bones referencing the Nickelodeon stop-motion animation series Prometheus and Bob (1996–2000), in which an alien tries to educate a dull-witted caveman on how to live in modern society.
CAN YILDIRIM and LALIN MERCAN, shelter spear, egg hunt, 2025, graphite, colored pencil and heavy gel medium on paper, mounted on aluminum, pvc isolated clothesline, polyurethane cast chicken foot sculpture, auto paint, 22.5 cm x 30 cm x 4 mm. Courtesy the artists and Kiralik Depo, Istanbul.
In a nearby corner, the sculptural likeness of a birthday cake, titled common lot (2025), puffed with artificial smoke. Boasting swirls of lavender and turquoise icing and melatonin gummy bears, the cake was also decorated with cherry-on-top antidepressants that evoked a cynical celebration of psychosis, abnormality, and disorder.
CAN YILDIRIM and LALIN MERCAN, common lot, 2025, multipurpose plaster filler, styrofoam, acrylic, epoxy cast melatonin gummy bears, antipsychotic-antidepressant dust, pearl beads, fog machine, 30 × 30 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artists and Kiralik Depo, Istanbul.
Elsewhere in the room, a batch of identically shaped pearls, pill-like and pierced with metal pins, were spread over a half-unfurled green yoga mat. For this installation, titled downward facing dog (LET GO OF ANGER AND JEALOUSY) (2025), Turkish artist Berkin Gülten contributed a VR video screened on a small tablet, its epileptic point-of-view shot reeling and pitching in the confines of a sterile, digital bedroom. The work generated dysphoria, as the uniformity of each impaled pearl effectually counteracted the mundane, facile wisdom that everyone is unique, thus destabilizing one’s sense of individuality.
Akin to Dante and Virgil traversing the Inferno, there were many levels of hell through which visitors to “superanxiety” had to pass. The two main exhibition rooms, street-facing and subterranean, were connected by a magenta esophageal tunnel lined with the artists’ mordant grand celebration series (2025) of insect portraiture. Here, each drawing was plastered with uplifting words, such as “hooray” and “victory.”
Installation view of CAN YILDIRIM and LALIN MERCAN’s "superanxiety" at Kiralik Depo, Istanbul, 2025. Courtesy the artists and Kiralik Depo.
As if descending further into a realm reminiscent of Tartarus—a depth of doom for those condemned by the gods of Greek mythology—“superanxiety” offered a bar festooned with the titles of artworks shown in past exhibitions at Kiralık Depo, its bespoke leather seats collectively bearing the title migtao bar stool (2025). Inspired by Yıldırım’s former life as an art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where a local bar’s counter was scrawled with the names of its regulars, the dungeon-like space was retrofitted for the sort of oddball depressives and fatalists that haunted the dives of his formative years.
In another corner, the artists’ buyable publication recoil scrapbook (2025) recalled the gun-freak American survivalist magazine Recoil Offgrid, which exemplifies the hardcore consumerism of doomsday preppers fretting over an impending apocalypse. Hanging next to the book was four sheen, a soul time (2025), a polyester tapestry imprinted with bright orange poetic logorrhea, the distorted words seemingly seared into the fabric—bespeaking a “superanxiety” ablaze with the inner brimstone of artists from a generation subliminally overdosing on fabricated hysterics made real.
Matt A. Hanson is an art writer based in Istanbul.
